Add this to the list of adventure games that no one will ever play:
Simon & Schuster’s latest release, Daria’s Inferno. Poorly marketed
and virtually unheard of by adventure gamers, Daria’s Inferno is based
on MTV’s hit television series, Daria. While it is far from a classic,
still it deserves a better fate than anonymity.

MTV’s Daria is a
spin-off from those modern icons of popular culture and intellectual representatives
of today’s youth, Beavis and Butt-head. Daria Morgendorffer, though, is the academic
antithesis of our brain-addled friends. Unlike Beavis and Butt-head, who we laughed
at, her misanthropic outlook is meant to elicit snickers as we wink knowingly
at her droll observations. To be honest, and maybe it does have something to do
with my age, I just did not find her or this game very funny. On the other hand,
my ten-year-old son Jacob found Daria’s musings hysterical, and I suspect he is
more the audience that Simon & Schuster is aiming to impress.

Daria’s
Inferno contains all of the characters and original voices from the television
series and is a first-class production. As Daria sits in Mr. O’Neill’s class listening
to a recitation of that timeless classic, Dante’s Inferno, Principal Li
interrupts announcing the felonious theft of the Five Crucial Instruments of Institutional
Education–a #2 pencil, a Winnie the Pooh book, a hall pass, a disciplinarian
award, and Daria’s younger sister Quinn. Retribution is threatened unless the
thief returns the five objects by the end of the school day. Daria soon nods off
in class and awakes to find herself in her own nightmare version of Dante’s Inferno.
Her minimally animated adventure will now require you to visit the five circles
of teenage hell–high school, the fashion mall, Degas Street (sort of a preppie
hangout), your parent’s home, and the principal’s office.

The game is a
throwback to the animated 2D games of the past. If you have played Beavis and
Butt-head Do U or the classic Virtual Stupidity, then you will be able
to jump right into the fray of Mike Judge’s animation. The humor this time is
more cutting-edge and based on Daria’s insufferable observations of everything
in her life. Eventually, though, her sarcasm wears thin. Is there nothing this
girl likes? She ridicules cheerleaders, school, jocks, shopping malls, models,
siblings, parents, and on and on and on.

The interface is traditional point-and-click.
Daria can retrieve objects that can then be placed in her inventory and later
used to solve puzzles. The majority of the puzzles are beginner level, and in
fact I completed the entire game in two evenings. Once an area has been completed,
it can later be revisited to search for any inventory items that may have been
missed. One really helpful highlight for those who are stumped is a feature called
“Sick, Sad World.” These are short, humorous commercials that are really
clues as to what to do in certain areas, and they are well-done and funny. Daria’s
movement can be controlled with either the mouse or keyboard, and I highly recommend
the keyboard as Daria will come to a complete stop when she reaches the spot where
you clicked the mouse. Normally this would not be a problem in an adventure game,
but in an attempt to lengthen the gameplay, the developers have included on every
level wandering obstacles. Basically, these obstacles are people who are indigenous
to the area–for example, in the school halls there are wandering students–when
Daria bumps into them, it raises her irritation meter. When the irritation meter
is off the screen, then Daria is transported back to the beginning of the level.

Actually,
this is not as bad as it sounds since you can then start again from the screen
you just left. Even the wandering obstacles can be stopped if Daria clicks the
correct inventory item on them, e.g., a whistle stops the football players and
a portable cell phone will stop Daria’s mother. Any experienced adventurer will
find this an extremely annoying game feature, but as we will now discover, different
strokes for different folks.

To be honest, I was prepared to slam this game.
It is short, it is not funny, the puzzles are too easy, the game length is artificially
padded, and the final level is so quick it is almost as though the developers
ran out of ideas. Then something funny happened. I clicked the Daria icon
on my desktop so that I could load my saved game to grab some screenshots and
I noticed that besides my save, there were now three others. Besides Jacob, who
had started a game of his own, my 13-year old son Jonathan also had a save, and
my oldest son’s 16-year old girlfriend Dana was about halfway through the game.
Later that night, I watched as Jonathan and Jacob played Daria. They were
laughing and enjoying every second of the game, and finally it dawned on me–this
game was not released for me, it was made for the MTV Generation. As an unexpected
side bonus, they were having a positive experience playing an adventure game and
solving puzzles. They didn’t care that it was too easy because they were thrilled
every time another puzzle was solved.

Bottom line: if you are over the age
of 25, then don’t bother with Daria’s Inferno, chances are it is not your
cup of tea. If you are under the age of 25 and are already a fan of the show,
then the low retail price of $21.99 is an added inducement to purchase the game.
And whether you are a youngster playing the game or a baby boomer watching a youngster
playing the game, you are guaranteed a good time. I still wish, though, that there
was a better marketing campaign for the game.

Final Grade: C+

If
you enjoyed playing Daria’s Inferno, then:
Read: Catcher in
the Rye
Watch: Daria on MTV
Play: Beavis and
Butt-head in Virtual Stupidity

System Requirements:

PC:
Pentium 166
Windows 95/98

32 MB RAM
4X CD-ROM

Mac:
Power Macintosh

132 MHz or higher
16 MB RAM
System 7.6 or higher
4X CD-ROM