Goodbye Deponia - Review

Deponia has been a series I’ve always been interested in. I played through half of the first game and always vowed to come back to it. I even bought the trilogy on sale in preparation.  Then it wound up far back in the back catalogue, forgotten. Now with the series being being ported over to the Switch, it’s a chance to catch up on a series I’d always thought was what I wanted in a point and click adventure.

The story of Deponia takes place across three games. In case you haven’t played the first two, the city of Elysium sits high above the world of Deponia. Long thought lifeless, the Elders of Elysium intend to destroy it. However, turns out that it’s not so lifeless. Rufus, a human still living in Deponia who is determined to escape to Elysium, crosses paths with Goal, a female from Elysium. What follows is trying to stop Deponia from being destroyed as Rufus tries to get to the floating city. By the time we get to Goodbye Deponia, Rufus and Goal are on the run from a shady organisation called Organon. Following on from the events of Chaos on Deponia, Rufus is no longer just trying to escape Deponia. Rufus and Goal need to stop the Organon from overtaking Elysium, and stop Elysium from destroying Deponia. Along the way Rufus will bumble his way from situation to situation. 

The Deponia games are a point and click adventure series, with a heavy helping of humour and ‘zaniness’. The humour is very much based around Rufus and his snarkiness and selfishness, but more on the sense of humour later. The big problem with this straight away is that Rufus is generally such an unrepentant asshole. It makes it really hard to find the humour in a lot of situations. I get that he’s meant to be like this, everyone in the game is snarky and those who know Rufus want nothing to do with him. TV shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia have the main cast being assholes, but they’re also the butt of the joke and their own worst enemies. In Deponia, everyone has to not only tolerate Rufus, but almost nothing has any real consequence and what does Rufus care. Turns out through the story that there is a reason why Rufus is the way he is outside of his control, but at no point does it feel like it changes how you view things. 

How about the point and clicking? Being a Switch game there is no mouse, so everything is controlled by the buttons. This means you can’t just click on objects, instead Rufus must walk to the relevant interaction. It’s workable, but whenever objects are very close together you’ll need to use the controls to cycle through them. Sometimes you can be right by the object and it won’t bring up the interaction symbol, so you have to move around until you find it. As I said, it’s workable, it’ll just never be as good as just using a mouse.

Some puzzles take the form of minigames, which thankfully become skippable when the game can see you're struggling. For the rest of the puzzles you’re going to have to work it out yourself, or use a guide. With how obtuse some of these puzzles can get I wouldn’t blame you using a guide. More often than not the game wants to make the solutions to puzzles funny too, which seems to mean that they defy the logic you would expect. Some people will love this, it can take some creative thinking while other adventure games can be too serious. It will of course frustrate others because the game gives you several objectives to deal with and no real help on how to tackle them. 

Humour plays a big part in the Deponia series and that’s no different for these two games. Kicking off with a fourth wall breaking tutorial that genuinely got laughs out of me was a good start. Then the opening song happened...the entire delivery felt off, it was straight up bad. All I could think about was how much trouble they must’ve had wording the songs to retain the same feel and fit into the confines of the pre-existing music. These songs happen throughout to narrate what’s happening, only it sounds like a nonsensical stream of consciousness delivered with a surprising amount of grandiose given it barely makes sense. The general approach of humour in Deponia is broad and crass, going for that whole ‘being un-PC’ vibe.

This includes sexist jokes from very early on and throughout both games, pretty questionable content involving a pedophile, and then there’s an organ grinder puzzle. For starters there’s a black character called Monkey, he’s part of a dancing monkey/organ grinding duo. While the joke is that the other person was the dancing monkey, that still doesn’t excuse the racist part. To make matters worse you’re tasked with finding a new person to become the dancing monkey. For an inexplicable reason Rufus manages to work it so he recruits one of very few black characters in the game to be the dancing monkey. Further doubling down on this deeply disappointing turn of events Rufus then takes the money she earned with both himself and ‘Monkey’ pretty much telling her that she’s now in servitude. Now I find it hard to believe it is truly just an error in translation, the game revels in its inappropriateness.

There are a fair few hours of game here, especially when it’s easy to get stuck on some puzzles and moving back and forth through areas feels like forever. Yet it’s hard not to feel like the trilogy couldn’t have been condensed down into maybe two games to tell the same story. While you can pick up what’s going on in the third game, it doesn’t feel like you were playing a full game that stands alone on its own without the others. It also is not titled like the games are the one story broken into three, they come across as full fledged sequels but aren’t really. 

Review code provided by Daedalic Entertainment