‘Demeo’ Delivers Your Virtual D&D Dreams – But Not the Way You’d Think
We had a chance to play Demeo, a virtual tabletop game in the most unexpectedly delightful sense of the word.
Two turns after confronting the Rat King, a foul, mutated rat that has become “leader and master of rodents” it’s clear that the party is doomed. The stalwart Guardian is poisoned and on her last hit point. The Hunter and Assassin got clumped too close together and a stray fire elemental caught them and an exploding barrel in a fireball.
And toxic slime is everywhere. Not to mention the hordes of rats.
Losing an entire party has never felt this good. Demeo is a game that brings the tabletop experience to the digital world, quite literally. But not in the way you’d think.
Demeo is a fully realized tabletop RPG-style dungeon-crawling video game, which is a mouthful to say, but unlike what you might be picturing Demeo is a game where you move your character’s miniature around a digital 3-D tabletop, doing battle with cursed elves, exploding slimes, spiders, and several basements’ worth of rats.
It feels like you’re playing through an old-school D&D adventure. Not that you’re the characters having it, but that you’re gathered with your friends in a digital basement to hang out and game. Which is where the game sings.
Demeo – Virtual Dungeons in a Virtual Basement
Demeo doesn’t just bring the moving from room to room on a battlegrid part of old school D&D to life. It brings the hanging out in a “cool basement” and playing with your friends part to life as well. When you load into the game, the conceit is immediately apparent. You’re playing a character, not by embodying them in the usual way, but by playing them like you would in a tabletop game.
You move them around a table kitted out with an entire dwarven forge’s worth of 3D terrain. Features like dynamic lighting and vision come into play, which leads to some rather surprising moments.
Sometimes you might round a corner and find your heroes have uncovered a new treasure chest. Or a nest of rats. Or exploding barrels. And every time it’s wonderful.
Demeo manages to make moving through a dungeon and randomly getting absolutely devastated by what you blundered into feeling somehow good. Because you learn a lesson.
And the next playthrough you’ll be a little more cautious. Maybe you’ll wait for the rest of the party to reveal the next room.
Or maybe you throw caution to the wind. Because just as often, when you roll Demeo’s giant d12 of doom which powers the whole experience, you’ll get a critical hit and suddenly turn what was a desperate, pitched battle into a snowball of victory.
Characters with Character
On the character side of things, you’ll find all the usual suspects here. There’s a melee-focused tanky Guardian who is all about building up armor and taking hits so the squishier heroes don’t. Meanwhile the Hunter snipes foes at a distance with a powerful bow and magic that can summon allies or even turn enemies into friends. While the deadly assassin cloaks in shadows and can deliver vicious backstabs.
And the sorcerer mostly dies because you got used to playing magic characters in 5th Edition D&D so you keep running into fights when you really shouldn’t.
Again, old-school tabletop vibes for days. Because Demeo is a game about exploring a dungeon and figuring out the risk of exploring the whole floor once you’ve found the way to the next level, vs. moving on and conserving your limited health for the challenges to come.
Replayability and Retro Vibes
You can play Demeo on your own. But where it really shines is with friends. When you and your buds are all in that virtual basement moving around an even more virtualer dungeon, it just feels good. Like staying up late at your friend’s house, bags of Cheetos and cheese pizzas fueling your adventures, knowing full well you’ll sleep until 1 the next day, roll out of bed and do it again.
The game is available on PC and many virtual reality systems. We had a chance to play the PS VR 2 version, and it’s incredible. While the game is absolutely fun on the PC, the VR experience is breathtaking.
The attention to detail is fantastic both in the dungeon and more importantly in the virtual game room you’re in. It’s incredible to me how much time I spent just looking around the virtual environs, soaking in details like posters or tapes littered around the place. It’s the kind of stuff that only comes from loving that experience, and knowing what it feels like.
That kind of care mattered to me just as much as the complexity of the adventure. Moreso, because I was playing in virtual reality. I’ve played other VR games, and time and again, it’s the little things that end up mattering most.
Definitely give this game a go if you are looking for a virtual tabletop experience like no other.
‘Demeo’ is available on PC and PS5 today!
