Dadish (Android, 2020)

Rating: 9/10

How many unplanned game reviews have I done now? Well, I guess this is yet another one. I was talking to a friend a few months ago and they told me about Dadish, so I gave it a shot and liked it.

Dadish is a platformer about a dad who is a radish. It's a portmanteau. That's the kind of dry humor that I like this game for. I guess the story is that Dadish fell asleep and his kids followed after a red balloon. There's not really much of a plot beyond that, but that's normal for platformers. Dadish has 40 kids he has to find. How he knows where any of them are is beyond me. Oh and there's a screeching possum as well.

You have to go through short levels full of fast food-themed enemies (I guess because fast food is bad for you?). Even boss fights are pretty short once you figure out what to do. Each (non-boss) level has a star for you to find while you look for your kid. In the beginning, they're fairly easy to find until the more difficult puzzles come in. At that point, you probably just want to get through the level instead of looking for a star. 

At the end of each level, you find one of your kids, and then comes what I think getting through each level is worth: the humor. Every line of dialog is just full of excellent dry humor, that manages to stay PG (Now that I think about it, the humor and even the art kind of reminds me of Adventure Time). In the beginning, Dadish is just looking for his children, but as time goes on, he's looking for his "stupid children" to ground them. I wish more games had silly dialog like this. Sigh. I also like how completely oblivious Dadish is about the plotline concerning the fast-food enemies. And Thomas Young, if you're reading this, I noticed the Mario references.

Pros:

+ The movement feels solid.

+ The music is good.

+ The dialog is simple but witty.

+ Challenging puzzles.

Cons:

- No controller support.

- Some kind of power-up so you don't die in one hit would've been nice; or just power-ups in general.

- There aren't a lot of checkpoints within the levels, which makes the later levels really difficult.

Final Thoughts:

Dadish was fun for me. It's a pretty well-made app game and unlike most good app games like Monument Valley and Evoland, it's completely free unless you want to get rid of the ads. I played this on my GPD XD+ and mapped my controls. Although it was good for most of the game, sometimes the controls would lock up and I just used the touchscreen instead. It would be nice if the devs make it controller compatible. Do I recommend Dadish? Absolutely! It's a fun little mobile game that I would love to see get sequels or at the very least a PC port.

That should be the last of my unplanned reviews. Now I can finally continue my game backlog. If any games that interest me pop up, they're going somewhere in the list instead of coming before what I already had lined up.