Chaos on Deponia continues the adventures of Rufus and company, picking up directly where its progenitor left-off, though not in a way that I was a fan of. I’ve never liked sequels that base their plot completely on upending your prior accomplishments, and Chaos does that to a large degree.

But before I get into nitty gritty, let me state real quick that this review will focus primarily on the narrative as the technical aspects have not visibly changed from the first Deponia (my critique here for reference- https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/319971/). In some ways, this can be seen as a criticism- that the team at Daedalic reused every single asset without bothering to implement any alterations. However, I’m not quite of that view. To restate something ACG once imparted to me, my job as a critic, in evaluating sequels, is not to tell a developer what they should have modified: it is to examine whether or not they improved on the flaws from the original, and the art style and animations, while having limitations, were not derogatory enough to warrant being drawbacks.

That being said, it appears no one at Daedalic even bothered acknowledging the existence of any issues. The poor lip syncing was noticeable before, but the increased amount of cutscenes and dialogue in Chaos doubles-down on their importunity - it’s as though the directors had the oral movements animated before the ADR and then desultorily tried to match the recorded dialogue to the mouthing, leaving all the characters looking as though they’re suffering from tardive dyskinesia. Alongside this, you have the occasional typo and mismatched word in the subtitles.

The whole extensively-2D, Adobe Flash-esque aesthetic also can’t help appearing cheap in this day-and-age. While I personally didn’t have any qualms with it, I can see modern gamers trying to get into the PNC genre at risk of judging a book by its cover.

Sound is pretty much the exact same as the original. The score is slightly better: not only was the main theme reworked to be less brassy and more orchestral-like, but I felt areas got more dedication in terms of unique musical strata. That being said, it’s still not particularly memorable, and I wasn’t a fan of the “heroic” leitmotif that plays in the latter half of the game.

The voice acting remains top notch. Kerry Shale continues to nail that balancing act of simultaneously making Rufus smarmy, pretentious, clever, and ultimately likable, his performance only slipping during an exposition dump at the end of the second act (more on that below). However, it is Alix Wilton Regan’s role as Goal (who, side note, I just realized played Aya in AC Origins) that deserves particular praise, due to her having to portray three distinct versions of the heroine, and she does a superb job there.

On that note, we can transition back to the story, where the real problems with Chaos lie. As I alluded to before, it upturns every successful enterprise that was completed in Deponia 1: fans will recall how Rufus had undergone an arc wherein he transitioned from a selfish person to being more caring, illustrated via him telling Goal the truth and secretly swapping her cartridge with the reformed persona. It was such a nice cliffhanger as you didn’t know what Goal was going to do to sabotage the Organon’s plans to blow-up Deponia, nor did you know what would become of Rufus having to return back home.

Well, you need not worry as nothing substantial occurs from either of those waypoints. After suffering through an annoying introduction that juxtaposes Rufus’s torturing of a bird with an argument between Doc and his wife over whether or not Rufus is competent (yeah, it gets old after the first joke), Rufus, for some stupid reason, decides to create a contraption that will send him hurtling after Goal.

Look, I get that Rufus’s whole shtick is being an idiot, but part of the appeal of the first game’s ending was that he was, at the very least, going to trust someone else (Goal) to succeed where he had failed, and consequently live with the effects of his decision. Here, it’s as though the writers thought a tempered Rufus would be too neutered for fans and opted to degrade him back to his Kuvac-self instead of learning to write him differently.

The result is a series of shenanigans that culminate in Goal crashing in a crime republic and getting her mind split into a trifecta of personalities that Rufus spends the majority of his time attempting to rejoin. Yeah, you read that right. While Deponia 1 had you traveling all over the eponymous planet adapting to different demands and circumstances that arose, the writers thought it would be funner for you to stay in one place resolving a single moronic action done by Rufus. It’s not that this area, dubbed the Floating Black Market, lacks variety (far from it); it’s more that the story impetus is severely flawed. Anything interesting that could have come about from Goal making it to Elysium is tossed aside in favor of what is essentially a rehash of the first game’s plot of restoring her mind.

The new cast of individuals you run into aren’t as three-dimensional as their predecessors from the first game- what I mean is they tend to rest their appeal on a singular note expressed multiple times over the diversity of dispositions that the OGs tended to have (i.e., the bartender being a gross straight-shooter, the subservient hobo being a lethargic fool, the pseudo-Italian singer being a pseudo-Italian singer). That being said, this doesn’t apply to all of them, and for those that do, they’re still entertaining as heck to interact with, with Rufus rarely getting the final one-up over them without suffering some sort of harm (physical or wordle) in the process.

Some of the conversations will have you laughing out loud (the ones with the Robo-Dog and Captain Seagull did it for me), but overall a lot of the discourse can’t help but feel like standard NPC sidequest issuances layered with a new coat of paint- most of the denizens have something they need you to do for them, and so you’re going to be running around like an errand boy. This operates in contrast to the first Deponia wherein Rufus had more agency in his actions.+

Granted, this is how PNCs generally work; what makes Chaos’s worse for wear is the way in which these subtasks are delineated- you’ll complete something expecting a direct result, only for another component to come up that needs addressing, and it tends to be a little esoteric in scope.++ It reminded me a lot of the first Metroid Prime wherein every time you received a weapon allowing you further access to a previous area, you would discover a new barrier that required a new tool. In that kind of game, the effect was exploration being discouraged. In a PNC, it leads to occasional frustrations and pacing issues. Chaos took me about three hours longer to complete than the first Deponia, and it really does drag through a combination of those aforementioned stacked objectives and the final act being a whole shebang of nonsense thrown together.+++

There were some other flaws in the storyline that I will speak about at the bottom due to them containing more spoilers.++++

In the end, I can’t say I had as much fun with Chaos on Deponia as I did with its prequel. It has its moments for sure, but when you combine the slog-skewered pacing with the disappointment of it being a remake containing the exact same character arc for its protagonist, you get a product that can’t help but feel like filler to a large extent. It’s hard to judge how integral this entry is in the series without playing the sequels, but on its own merits it definitely faltered.

The only real absolute positive I can say is that the puzzles/solutions are a lot easier this time around. While I do think Deponia 1 could have been resolved without guides through some patience, there’s no denying that Chaos provides a greater sense of achievement by making the item mixing/matching/application system a lot more straightforward.


Postnote- like the first title, there are minigames that have to be completed for progression. Thankfully they’re all skippable as I found the mechanics to be too rough to be worth it.
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+Compare Rufus concocting the wake-up potion of his own volition to him running around the Floating Black Market to get platypus removed from the menu solely because his dad asked him to and you’ll see what I mean.


++One example that illustrates this best is the part where you need to scribe a poem for Lady Goal. Using common sense, you’d think all you need to do is chat with the Poet and get his aid, but no, you have to go to the Platypus Salesman and read one of his greeting cards BEFORE unlocking the additional help option from the Bard.


+++The incomprehension begins with Lady Goal’s flip-flopping, which I’ll speak more on below. It then continues with Cletus deciding to stop the Organon’s planned detonation of Deponia since the explosion wouldn’t be big enough and would consequently alert the Elysians to the presence of life-on-Earth. Why in the world (no pun intended) would the Organons severely miscalculate their own charges, and why is Cletus the only one who knows? Then you get him choosing to spare Rufus instead of just offing him once he confesses to Goal. And on the topic of the confession, why doesn’t Rufus fully explain why he re-initiated the timer instead of giving a half-truth and opening the gates to cliche melodrama? It’s like the writers were insistent on rehashing to a tee the end-scene from the first Deponia wherein Rufus has a moral dilemma (right down to the player having the option to “try” to lie). Him also not caring AT ALL for the fate of the Resistance fighters came off as odd.


++++The first is Lady Goal- her characterization makes no sense. After you successfully expose Seagull, she professes her love for Rufus and agrees to go with him, yet then randomly changes her mind and leaves with Cletus to let Deponia die? And then further swaps again at the very end because Rufus was truthful (like he was with Seagull)...it’s like what? The writers clearly didn’t know whether they wanted Lady Goal to represent Goal’s evil-nature or snootiness.

The second is Seagull- he’s immediately unveiled to be Rufus’s dad, and the two have the hysterical convos you would expect from such a father-son duo. However, he ends up being just another standard quest-giving NPC; I really felt the writers could’ve done more with his character given his personal connection to Rufus.

The third is some ableist humor that hasn’t aged particularly well in this day and age. One, “retard” is used a couple of times in the non-Rick and Morty sense of the term. Two, there are a couple of characters that have defects: Janosch, the leader of the anti-Organon Resistance movement, has a lisp that causes him to constantly slur, and Donna, the head of a crime syndicate, is…I don’t even know how to describe her. It’s like they were trying to caricature somebody with a high degree of Autism and muteness, and it just comes across as some disgusting rendition of cerebral palsy. Now, I know there will be some people who come at me saying I’m being too PC, but my counter would be that, even if that was the case, these jokes drag on too long- you get the gist of it the initial time and don’t need it hammered nonstop.

Fourth is an exposition dump that occurs between Lady Goal (in Donna’s body) and Rufus. The sequence could’ve been handled better instead of throwing everything out at once.