Pen-and-paper gaming works a little like Murphy’s law: as young hobbyists get old enough to fully grasp the intricate rules of Dungeons & Dragons or other, similarly complex tabletop RPGs like Cyberpunk 2020, it’s almost inevitable that age and wisdom give way to hectic work schedules and busy personal lives, making it grueling to stay consistent with any RPG. By stark contrast, Demeo takes many of the most enjoyable conventions of D&D – including its strategic turn-based combat, deep character classes, and an extensive bestiary of goblins and ghouls – and juices them into a digital formula that’s condensed to be immediately engaging. The result is an infinitely replayable, widely accessible, easy-to-learn (yet difficult to master) tabletop-inspired game that feels just as good in a VR headset – such as the brand-new PlayStation VR2 or the portable Meta Quest 2 – as it does on any gaming PC.
Up to four players can pop into the same session at any time, and thanks to wide crossplay support extends across a number of VR and non-VR platforms (notably absent: Nintendo Switch and Xbox), and aside from a few bugs – like characters getting stuck in geometry and refusing to move in some of the worst instances – it’s all pretty seamless. Even when things aren’t going well, Demeo’s versatility makes it just as much fun to play whether you choose to head online with up to four strangers in Quickplay mode, gather your established tabletop buddies in a private room, or go it completely alone in Skirmish mode.
Five visually-diverse campaigns are broken down into three floors apiece, each more difficult than the last until you face the area boss – like the macabre Elven Queen or the deadly Serpent Lord – on the third and final floor. For the sake of convenience, it can take roughly 30 minutes to one hour to complete each floor – but it’s usually on the quicker side since all you need to do for the first two floors is find the key and make it to the locked door in one piece.
It all takes place on a simulated game board with miniatures and tile-based topography that evokes the sense of playing a game within a game. You’re affecting a fantasy setting rather than being fully transported to one, and to this end, Demeo’s basement kitsch works notably well – it makes me feel like I’m playing in the comfort of a buddy’s house rather than in an actual dungeon.
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There’s no complex story to speak of, though each campaign is accompanied by an interactive pamphlet that lets you flip through the details about the area boss, various monster types (including their strengths and weaknesses), and a few general story tidbits explaining what’s going on. This means Demeo always sticks to its most essential basics, like a one-shot pen-and-paper campaign you might find in a game store (or in the depths of an internet forum) and it’s great that it doesn’t need a human dungeon master to run the show.
While the gameplay might look like an isometric CRPG in the vein of Divinity: Original Sin 2 or Baldur’s Gate from a distance, but don’t be confused: Demeo deftly takes you directly to where the action is without getting bogged down in story, and thanks to its intelligent monster AI that keeps you on your toes with plenty of status-altering spells, movement-deterring group attacks, and smart use of chokepoints – it’s much more of a tactical board game than an RPG.
Each of the seven playable classes is decked out with a dynamic, constantly revolving set of powerful abilities unlocked through a randomly generating deck of cards. Defeating monsters gradually refills your card meter until a new card is drawn, but it’s slow enough to make you think about when to unleash your best abilities. It’s a slight disappointment, though, that each of the characters available to use in your party is entirely premade, name and all. Also, it’s a bit of a bummer that Demeo’s account-wide progression system is only cosmetic – meaning you won’t see your characters gain any persistent progress through an extended series of quests and adventures.
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This can seem oversimplified, but the prime benefit is that you or anyone else can immediately drop into an ongoing session, pick up a character, and… that’s it. You can just play without any knowledge of the rules, and the rest is up to a mixture of skill, strategy, and fate. Much like its tabletop counterparts, Demeo is governed by a dice-rolling system, but it’s way more compact with three potential outcomes – either your attack or spell works as intended when the dice lands on one sword, delivers a critical hit when the dice lands on two swords, or misses and potentially strikes a teammate when it lands on a skull.
Things are kept nice and clean by the fact that each character gets two action points per round. For example, moving from one tile to another, delivering a basic attack on a monster, or redeeming a card to unleash a unique ability will generally take up one action point. But it’s nice that some cards – like health potions – are treated like free actions that don’t use any points at all. Demeo’s initiative system is also pretty straightforward: monsters and players make their moves on alternating rounds, and you can comfortably view everyone’s move order on your right wrist in VR. It also feels smooth to just pick up your character and plop it down wherever you want when it’s time to move or attack, and the card deck system is stylishly represented by a literal deck held in your left hand. It pops out when you turn your left palm toward your face, and it’s cool that you can use any ability in your deck by grabbing the card and dropping it onto the map.
Each campaign is themed around different creatures with different tactics, but Demeo’s monster encounters always feel challenging without immediately overwhelming you, and its tense turn-based combat tends to be unpredictable no matter which campaign you’re playing in. Since each character’s basic attack only does three points of damage, combat often leans more in favor of the dungeon master’s minions than the players. But considering each campaign only takes, at most, three hours to complete from end to end, it’s never really that big of a deal if you lose. It’s a nice consolation prize that you’ll still earn at least a little progression XP at the end of a floor, even if your party wipes before beating the final boss.
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If you get bored or distracted, you can just save at the end of a floor (while speaking to the card merchant) though it’s frustrating that you can’t save in the middle of a floor if reality calls mid-run. And if you forget to save before quitting mid-game, you lose all the experience points that you would have earned toward your account’s progression had you simply died. This makes sense as an incentive to keep people from quitting in the middle of an online session, but I missed out on too many opportunities to earn XP in the single-player Skirmish mode just because I saw where things were heading and didn’t feel like narrowly carving my way out of danger or waiting for my party to wipe.
That said, Demeo’s satisfyingly asymmetric combat encounters can feel like tug-of-war at their tensest moments; often managing to remain tight enough to make you think carefully about each move, but never so much that you’re left completely out of options if you have a few odd cards and some spare patience and creativity to figure something out. It’s only when the odds are most stacked against your party that the rich interplay between Demeo’s classes gets to shine, and there’s a level of nuance here that you don’t often see in true-blue RPGs.
For instance, the Barbarian has a grappling hook that he can use once per round, allowing him to quickly propel himself to a distant tile, bring enemies closer, or capture an elemental trap (like an exploding oil pot) to use as a projectile on his next turn. This means a party of four Barbarians can rapidly travel across the map in a group, barraging an opponent with wave after wave of elemental traps – including poison and fire traps that magnify one another’s effectiveness – then quickly move away together. It’s a remarkably different strategy than what would be tenable in a party containing one speedy Barbarian, a sneaky Assassin, a tanky Guardian, and one courage-inspiring Bard, each class bringing its own unique skills to create a bevy of strategic possibilities.
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Granted, the camera can be a bit finicky. This was especially the case when I approached Demeo from outside of a VR headset on both the PS5 and on Windows, where the map’s geometry often occluded important details and moving it around wasn’t always as intuitive as I would have liked. But in VR, you do get an impressive amount of control over the camera. Grabbing the world with both hands and stretching it out or spinning it around to get a better view of the board always felt natural to me, even though I felt like I was constantly moving it around and altering it to get a better angle. It’s cool that I could even zoom all the way into the board if I wanted an up-close look at the miniatures. I also appreciate the level of detail that developer Resolution Games placed into each of Demeo’s colorful zones, like the desert village of Izteria, and it all holds up while standing directly inside of them in VR.
Other players in Demeo’s multiplayer modes are represented by masks and hands, but there’s just enough detail there to give you the essence of social interaction in a physical space – that is, without the added hassle of setting up a game board and tearing it down after. It’s also pretty neat that you can unlock different cosmetic skins between sessions and, for what it’s worth, there’s no microtransaction shop here – so don’t even think about paying for a decked-out pair of dice.
My final gripe is that the Meta Quest 2 and Meta Rift versions have an exclusive Heroes’ Hangout mode which is missing from its PS VR2 and Steam counterpart, and it’s here where you can paint your own miniatures and read up on the various campaigns – or just kick back with a few arcade games. Even then, though, sucks that you can’t bring your own painted miniatures into actual Demeo sessions.