I’ve just finished another rewatch of the whole series of Daria. The two related books being hard to come by, and not owning a compatible GPS for the navigation voice thing, I checked out the other significant piece of spin-off material, this PC adventure game from 2000.

Daria’s Inferno does a fair job recreating the look of the show with appearances by many characters, all of whom are voiced by the show’s actors. The script is also authentic, with a writer of several episodes doing the honours. As a source of many new sarcastic quips, the game pretty much aces it. Not to mention new alter egos in the credits, which also features the full version of the theme song with extra verses.

Unfortunately the game can’t just be fan-pleasing, it has to deliver a compelling game experience, which is where it falls down. The game is a series of fetch quests, with dodgy pathing and hit detection from roaming mooks. You’re required to constantly click on wandering characters with a particular item, and if they touch you a few times you have to start the room again. This means getting kicked back to the room select screen and listening to the same sound bites again and again, which is the dark side of having the characters make amusing comments. The game likes putting you in maze-like areas where you have to find the right way by trial and error, and pick up items while being harassed by wandering irritants. It’s just not that fun.

Mercifully the game is short, and it’s worth struggling through the mediocre gameplay to hear what Daria has to say about all the objects she finds and the situation her dream puts her in. Yes, canon snobs: this game was all a dream, much like “Murder, She Snored”. It’s an elegant device for the purposes of the game, and it’s fun to see Mr. DeMartino’s classroom reimagined as a torture dungeon, as it is to walk around Daria’s oddly expansive house, or explore seldom-seen locations like Dega Street. And don’t forget to check for hints on every screen, as they take the form of little Sick, Sad World clips.

So while the art may look amateurish at points and the gameplay is more of a chore than a selling point, the Daria-ness of it all leads me to recommend it to fans as a sort of “lost episode”. As long as you can get it running, and I leave that part up to you; I used Virtualbox and a copy of Windows XP, but still encountered frequent crashes. Now, this is my stop. Got to get off. I may go pop. Excuse me.

PS. I just learned from reading the manual that you can use the arrow keys to move. That might have been easier in certain parts.