Deponia

Kuvaq, Deponia, is populated by people who salvage scrap which the rich city of Elysium dumps from above. You play as Rufus, a resident in Kuvaq who longs to make his way to Elysium to live a better life. His previous schemes have failed, but is determined to try once more.

Soon, he manages to board an airship, where he unfortunately knocks a woman called Goal off the airship and down into Deponia. It's love at first sight for Rufus, and he is determined to wake Goal from her unconscious state and make his way to Elysium.

The game is a point-and-click adventure, so it's the usual gameplay of talking to people, finding items, and using items to progress through the game. Usually, point-and-click adventure puzzles are comprised of logical solutions with the occasional far-fetched one thrown in. However, I found the majority of puzzles to be illogical, which meant I often relied on a walk-through, and still didn't quite understand the solution.

Part of the problem was that even if you understand your aim, there's not enough hints to get there. One example is that I had made my way into the Post Office, and I knew that there were some vouchers in the nearby shop which were for the Post Office. The shop assistant explains that she won't let you have them since she knows you have no money. I couldn't think of anything the game has shown me which would be a suitable form of payment, or a way of convincing her I could pay. What you have to do is make a tranquilliser dart, go outside the shop and fire it through the window. To be honest, the whole sequence involving the Post Office is extremely cryptic and I would be surprised if anyone could solve it without a walk-through. There's some puzzles that are mini games, but these are poorly explained too.

I think other games do a better job at hiding irrelevant items i.e. once you look at them then you can't interact with them again. Deponia has too many items that you can check again even though they are completely pointless.

The music changes as you move between areas so going back and forth between screens resets the music; which increases the repetition. I soon got tired of this and muted the music. The voice acting is fine for the most part. I did find the evil characters very annoying since their lines were louder in volume and had a terrible voice distortion effect. I thought the humour often fell flat, and even the best lines failed to make me laugh. There was a repeated joke/statement about Rufus ex-girlfriend doing the cleaning and I wasn't sure if this was blatant sexism or if Rufus was making sure you knew he wasn't the cleanest/kindest/helpful of characters.

Many point-and-click adventure games have interesting worlds and characters that you will remember way after you finish the game. However, Deponia doesn't have any such characters or locales. I didn't like the initial locales, but they get worse as you progress through the game. The main protagonist was very unlikeable and the supporting cast were forgettable.

There wasn't much story driving the game, but when you get to the final moments it seems to get interesting; but then doesn't have a satisfying conclusion. It is part of a series of games though, so to fully understand it, you will have to play the rest of the series.

Although it's a well-made game, I found the gameplay to be bad. With barely any story and unlikeable characters; I certainly won't be playing anymore in this series.

LucasArts Entertainment Company or Sierra Entertainment: You could like both, but, more often than not, people tended to prefer one over the other in the golden age of adventure games. Though King’s Quest VI was my introduction to the genre (and the Windows operating system it was bundled with), Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island series, and Full Throttle were the games I obsessed over and showed to visiting friends at any opportunity.

Daedalic Entertainment began as an interesting experiment but has quickly become one of the most recognizable names in modern adventure games, releasing The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav and cult favorite The Whispered World a while before that. Its recent titles dealt with heavy subject matter and dark fantasy worlds that feel closer to Sierra’s flagship series. Yet, Daedalic got its start with silly, colorful games that imitated LucasArts. Deponia is the developer’s return to this style of adventure.

Although it doesn’t hold up to LucasArt’s best, Deponia is a reminder of why some of us loved those games so much more than their contemporaries.

Deponia smells like garbage, because it’s a planet made of garbage. Its citizens have made this supposedly uninhabitable junkyard of a planet into their home. Everyone except Rufus. Deponia to him is nothing more than the planet that his father abandoned him on. Now, he wants to return to his birthplace far away in the sky.

Deponia (the game) is a lot of things: It’s an adventure, romance, and comedy all wrapped up into one goofy story. Rufus is a confident dope who bears much in common with Secret of Monkey Island’s Guybrush Threepwood. While his ambitions are a bit less, he possesses a similar wit and cluelessness in any given situation. He describes himself as “a cool version of herpes” but his friends and neighbors on Deponia would leave out the cool part. Though he is sympathetic, it took me some time to become attached to him. The same can be said about the game as a whole.

Deponia has a lot more in common with Secret of Monkey Island than just sharing a similar lead character. Everything from the dialog to the comically-driven puzzles recalls LucasArts’s classic. As a result, Deponia doesn’t feel all that fresh. It doesn’t help that the game has serious problems with pacing and puzzle design in its first act (the lengthiest of the three). Things are slow-going at first. The game soon gives you a lot of ground to cover in a large city hub, but you’ll run into some obtuse puzzles that won’t make much more sense once you stumble upon the solution. The logic behind some puzzles relies too heavily on a comedic mindset rather than that of a sensible human being.

LucasArts perfected their craft over the years, learning when to leave comedy out of the picture for playability. Deponia isn’t quite so discerning in its use of comedy nor is its comedic chops quite as cutting. The game prolongs dialog with bad joke after bad joke, at times. I can appreciate the spirit but I expect an adventure game to be more sparing in its humor. When every dialog option with a character doesn’t tell me anything about the game’s plot or characters, I start to become disinterested. I can’t stress enough though that these problems are mostly restricted to the first act. Even the comedy becomes stronger in the following acts -- it’s a very odd thing that makes me wonder what the production process was like behind the game.

Rufus’ life becomes complicated once his plans to escape Deponia end up with him becoming responsible for a girl named Goal. He accidentally incapacitates her and decides to find a way to make her regain consciousness, hoping that she’ll help bring him back to his father’s home planet. While Rufus has some depth, he is a self-serving character that is hard to root for until the game’s second half. The main reason the first half sags, however, is that Deponia is kind of a miserable place. Rufus’ neighbors, ex-girlfriend, and even his best friend are all mean to Rufus and not very interesting characters.

Despite Deponia being a rather nasty place, it's brought to life through a gorgeous hand-drawn aesthetic that recalls Curse of Monkey Island. The animation is very sub-par, with characters and backgrounds barely moving, but the design and art of the game’s locales are consistently interesting and eye-catching. Though the game is nice to look at, the dull animation is a constant reminder that this is developed by an indie with a modest budget. The same can be said of the English version’s hit-and-miss voice cast -- the game was originally voiced in German but there is no option to change to it. Thankfully Rufus sounds good and there are some quality performances later in the game, but it’s not top-caliber stuff. The grating voice effect on the game’s stormtrooper-esque Organon troopers is another chink in the game’s presentation.

Despite a poor beginning and ending, I can’t shake off the warm feeling Deponia left me with. It’s a game with a big heart and some clever puzzles that recall a special time in the history of adventure games. The game lacks the consistency, quality animation, and hilarity of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert’s work, but Deponia is a charming and creative adventure that stands above many of its contemporaries. You can deduce the game to being a tribute to the golden years of LucasArts, but isn’t that exactly what so many want right now?