I've only played two Daedalic games (as of the posting of this review), but I don't think it'd be too forward of me to label the company the John Hughes of point-and-click adventure titles. For those who never watched a Hughes film, what I mean by the comparison is his movies were often filled with narrative flaws that were offset by the sheer amount of charm generated by the cast and his direction.
In Deponia's case, it's not so much narrative flaws as it is flaws relating to gameplay. However, I'd be danged if I didn't have a positive experience with the game, and that has to do with how comically-diverting everything is.
Storywise, Deponia isn't anything exceptional; it's set in a half-post-apocalyptic, half-steampunk, all-around lethargic world that main protagonist Rufus wants no part of. Having been abandoned by his father and believing his intellect to be unappreciated by the citizenry, he has spent the majority of his time attempting to escape to the orbiting haven of Elysium.
While I felt that the first Daedalic game I played, "The Night of the Rabbit," didn't have a fully-conceived outline for the fantasy setting it occupied, I can safely say that Deponia is much more fluidly thought-out. Granted, this was always going to be an easier task to do with a more grounded story than one that indulged in the supernatural, but it's still a testament to the writing team for understanding all the important facets of their speculative tale when it came to the job of world building. You get a lot of details about character histories and the general gist of the town, and outside of one, late-game scene relating to the bad guys’ motivation, there isn’t a single exposition dump. I don’t think people realize just how hard it is to pull off that kind of approach. You risk either being too vague or filling in every other conversation with some kind of data divulgence that is ultimately no different than an expo dump dispersed via Vines. Here, I learned a lot about a lot of things through mandatory and voluntary conversations with the townsfolk, as well as oral descriptions from Rufus himself.
This culminates in you, very quickly, realizing just how much of a jackass Rufus is. Selfish, egotistical, possibly psychopathic- throw the thesaurus at him and you wouldn’t find a word out of place from the selection I laid out. But if the guy is so bad, why continue playing as him? Why spend the next hours of your life in his shoes?
Well, it’s a delicate balancing act that, again, proves just how genius the writers are. When you have a protagonist who has done (and continues to do) horrible things, you have to make them likeable. At the same time, you have to have other characters consistently one-up them WHILE ALSO giving the protagonist a few counter-jabs of their own.
Let’s break down these components to explain why each is necessary: the likability factor is pretty self-explanatory; if you don’t find the person entertaining, you’re not going to want to spend time with them (Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in "Goodfellas" is a prime example of this done right). The one-ups, executed in Deponia as primarily conversational, consistently check the character’s ego and remind players that they are not playing as a good guy. Often times, a story gets so caught-up in its hero’s journey that it either unintentionally forgets about its hero’s flaws or willfully does so for fear of hurting pacing, and that leads to inconsistencies harped on by astute viewers/readers; Deponia does not fall into that category with Rufus. And lastly, giving Rufus his own counter wit is necessary to avoid making him a consistent punching bag- no matter how much he may deserve it, having your protagonist get dicked on constantly without recourse will result in them coming off as pathetic. And that’s the last thing you want as a developer.
So to reiterate, the writers did a phenomenal job with Rufus. Like most PnCs, there is a ton of dialogue here, and seeing the back-and-forth banter between Rufus and co. leads to a lot of humorous moments courtesy of that delicate balance of verbal punches taken and thrown. It really helps that they manage to make Rufus an intelligent idiot- he does stupid things, but he’s also aware of his limitations, and isn’t afraid to stand up for himself when he’s called out on said limitations.
As I said before, the story isn’t anything special on the outset: Rufus hates his home-life and wants to go somewhere better via some crazy scheme. In the cusp of doing so, he encounters a female member of Elysium called Goal whom he falls head over heels for. However, Goal is caught up in a conspiracy involving members of the Elysian military; a conspiracy that Rufus will have to unravel over the course of his adventure.
Those who have been following my reviews know that I like to avoid giving away too much in the way of synopsis recap for fear of spoiling the experience, so what I’ll say here is that a lot of the plot focuses on Rufus’s shenanigans in his attempts to help Goal, and those shenanigans happen to involve almost every member of Deponia.
One thing worth noting is how much I ended up remembering every NPC I encountered; some are three-dimensional, most aren’t, but all have this endearing quality brought about by them being smart in some capacity. At the risk of scribing an absolute statement, you really don’t encounter an incompetent side character- they’re all miles ahead of Rufus in terms of their awareness about their society, but concurrently aren’t pretentious about it, which is a relief: often times, when you have a dumb protagonist in a large cast, the writers go out of their way to either make half their other characters idiots ("Spongebob") or arrogantly stubborn ("Ed, Edd n Eddy"). It’s not that either of those approaches can’t work (love both those shows), but it was nice to see a different approach taken wherein you have smarter, wittier NPCs who aren’t verbally humiliating Rufus every second sentence. That being said, one flaw with the dialogue is that there are numerous typos in the speech bubbles (as in, they don't match what the character is saying, not that they contain grammatical errors).
Alright, I’ve spoken enough about that- onto a new category, the graphics. I noted this in my review of The Night of the Rabbit (https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/279054/), but Daedalic Entertainment has developed its own distinct art style since the Edna & Harvey days that is continued here, albeit with a thematic twist: characters have dark outlines with realistic body proportions and facial expressions; architecture is, as noted above, steampunky with wooden planks and iron paneling/pipes converging together to convey a DIY, scrapped-together aesthetic; and color grading is generally a medley of yellows and browns mixed with soft filters. The last area does transition to cooler hues like blue and teal, but everything remains industrialized and metallic regardless.
Overall, it is beautifully-rendered, but there are pitfalls to the schema. First and foremost is the hit-or-miss quality of the character models; most look fine, but there are a number of them (Gizmo [who looks like an older version of Jimmy from EEnE], the Mayor, the receptionist) that are downright hideous and brought back painful memories of Psychonauts. Secondly, the animation for walking feels out of place with the backdrops; I don’t quite know how to describe it, but it’s like Rufus and the others are moonwalking whenever they move from place-to-place, not actually making contact with the ground on them. The animation looks even more shoddy in the animated cutscenes, which honestly seem like they were made from Flash (i.e., they look cheap and out-of-place in this bigger budget video game, even with its comedic tone). Thirdly, there are only three facial expressions per a character, making their reactions repetitive. Fourth, the lip-syncing almost never matches the words being spoken on screen, more resembling warbling mouth movements from a bad ADR dub.
That critique makes a good transition to the sound, beginning with the voice acting, which is stellar. Kerry Shale is credited with voicing several characters in the game, the biggest one being Rufus, and he nails it. That balancing act I described in great detail above would not have mattered if the voice actor did not deliver on multiple fronts: conveying Rufus’s insecurities, superiority complex, intelligence, idiocy, and romantic confidence in one package. Shale does all that and more, giving Rufus a slight lisp and high-strung demeanor countered by an easygoing, cocky vocalization. My descriptions won’t do it any justice- you have to listen to his delivery yourself. Everyone else does a great job, and real kudos has to be given to the voice directors- in a lot of ways, Deponia feels like the opposite of Syberia. In that game, I felt that the voice actors recorded their lines in individual booths independent from the other, and then their performances were played side-by-side without any direction whatsoever. Here, it comes off like real interplay, which I doubt actually happened- instead, what you have is strong directors who successfully got their voice artists to get in the mindset that they were engaged in a conversation with the other actor, thereby making it all sound so natural. And keep in mind, there is a TON of dialogue in the title: that there are no lapses in this quality is something worth praising. Even Rufus’s item descriptions contain gems of amusement.
The sound design, on the other hand, is pretty weak. Nothing stands out, and things that do are blatantly stock noises triggered to play the exact same version every time it's initiated (i.e., the crane/gate/drawers make the same din). Like the snap of the Marquis de Hoto’s fingers in The Night of the Rabbit, the only stock noise I really enjoyed was the swapping whenever Rufus combines two items.
The music was mixed. Despite the steampunk vistas, you don’t get anything steampunk or industrial-sounding. Instead, you get pretty generic beats that delineate between screens to either another mediocre tune that sounds like it was made through some online music creator, or nothing at all. Props should be given to having multiple tracks per an area instead of one overarching motif, but I can’t say anything but the main theme was memorable (and that was for a different reason- I found it more grating than enjoyable). I hope I’m not sounding too harsh, especially since I can’t create music to save my life, but considering how good "The Night of the Rabbit’s" OST could be, I felt resident Daedalic composer Finn Seliger had the potential to do better here.
Finally, we get to the gameplay. Daedalic has pioneered a system wherein you can do everything (except save/load files) through the mouse. Left click interacts, right click observes, and the mouse wheel allows you to bring up your inventory easily.
In PnCs, gameplay is always going to be simplistic from a controller standpoint. What we need to examine is whether the exploration, item gathering, and puzzle solving is enjoyable or hair-ripping inducing. Compared to Night of the Rabbit and (especially) Grim Fandango, Deponia’s progression is a lot more palatable. Honestly, the thing that really helps is that most of the game’s sections are centered on a few areas, making the puzzles easier to get a grasp of since you have less areas and less interactable objects to use from your inventory overall. Not to keep drawing comparisons to it, but The Night of the Rabbit’s issue was that, for the most part, you had a large overworld to walk between. Deponia’s most aggravating section is the town of Kuvaq which, uncoincidentally, contains the most sub-areas of all the sections.
That being said, what I will say is that Deponia is not a title you can rush through, and I do feel that I would’ve enjoyed even Kuvaq more had I taken my time and not attempted to get through it quickly. There are some contrived solutions, but there were a lot that I know I would not have had to look up if I had just paid attention to the conversations or item observations or even visual cues (okay, that one was a bit too far). I say all this as a plea to those reading this review who are potentially interested in playing Deponia- take your time and really pay attention to what is being conveyed in text.
Now, the one gameplay element I won’t defend are the minigames strewn throughout that often have you solving some small-scale puzzle, ranging from putting together a jigsaw puzzle of stained glass to rearranging track circuits. Not a single one, let me repeat, not a single one of them was fun. They were tedious, boring, and pointless. I think the creators realized this halfway through because you are literally given the option to skip most of them instantly. I’m always up for a change in gameplay (as happened with Dark Room, see my review here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/279158/), but that gameplay change needs to be enjoyable and it wasn’t here.
So, overall, what do you get with Deponia? You get a very charming release from Daedalic Entertainment, and the first entry in arguably their most popular franchise. The story is funny and keeps you jubilant through masterful direction and scripting that successfully gives you a jackass who is likeable and brought to life by a great performer. The gameplay has aged pretty well (minus a few parts that may require you to consult a walkthrough) and the graphical style is pleasant on the eyes (minus some ugly NPC models). The cast is great, but the sound design and score fail to live up to that standard. Finally, the pacing is strong and never drags out things unnecessarily.
There have been reports from gamers who played the game on Steam that there are bugs present. I personally did not experience any, but take it into consideration should you choose to purchase this. It took me over 7 hours to beat Deponia, which makes it a steal at a $10.00 price tag (even cheaper if you purchase it as part of the Daedalic Adventure Bundle). There are some growing pains, but the experience is agreeable for the most part.
In Deponia's case, it's not so much narrative flaws as it is flaws relating to gameplay. However, I'd be danged if I didn't have a positive experience with the game, and that has to do with how comically-diverting everything is.
Storywise, Deponia isn't anything exceptional; it's set in a half-post-apocalyptic, half-steampunk, all-around lethargic world that main protagonist Rufus wants no part of. Having been abandoned by his father and believing his intellect to be unappreciated by the citizenry, he has spent the majority of his time attempting to escape to the orbiting haven of Elysium.
While I felt that the first Daedalic game I played, "The Night of the Rabbit," didn't have a fully-conceived outline for the fantasy setting it occupied, I can safely say that Deponia is much more fluidly thought-out. Granted, this was always going to be an easier task to do with a more grounded story than one that indulged in the supernatural, but it's still a testament to the writing team for understanding all the important facets of their speculative tale when it came to the job of world building. You get a lot of details about character histories and the general gist of the town, and outside of one, late-game scene relating to the bad guys’ motivation, there isn’t a single exposition dump. I don’t think people realize just how hard it is to pull off that kind of approach. You risk either being too vague or filling in every other conversation with some kind of data divulgence that is ultimately no different than an expo dump dispersed via Vines. Here, I learned a lot about a lot of things through mandatory and voluntary conversations with the townsfolk, as well as oral descriptions from Rufus himself.
This culminates in you, very quickly, realizing just how much of a jackass Rufus is. Selfish, egotistical, possibly psychopathic- throw the thesaurus at him and you wouldn’t find a word out of place from the selection I laid out. But if the guy is so bad, why continue playing as him? Why spend the next hours of your life in his shoes?
Well, it’s a delicate balancing act that, again, proves just how genius the writers are. When you have a protagonist who has done (and continues to do) horrible things, you have to make them likeable. At the same time, you have to have other characters consistently one-up them WHILE ALSO giving the protagonist a few counter-jabs of their own.
Let’s break down these components to explain why each is necessary: the likability factor is pretty self-explanatory; if you don’t find the person entertaining, you’re not going to want to spend time with them (Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito in "Goodfellas" is a prime example of this done right). The one-ups, executed in Deponia as primarily conversational, consistently check the character’s ego and remind players that they are not playing as a good guy. Often times, a story gets so caught-up in its hero’s journey that it either unintentionally forgets about its hero’s flaws or willfully does so for fear of hurting pacing, and that leads to inconsistencies harped on by astute viewers/readers; Deponia does not fall into that category with Rufus. And lastly, giving Rufus his own counter wit is necessary to avoid making him a consistent punching bag- no matter how much he may deserve it, having your protagonist get dicked on constantly without recourse will result in them coming off as pathetic. And that’s the last thing you want as a developer.
So to reiterate, the writers did a phenomenal job with Rufus. Like most PnCs, there is a ton of dialogue here, and seeing the back-and-forth banter between Rufus and co. leads to a lot of humorous moments courtesy of that delicate balance of verbal punches taken and thrown. It really helps that they manage to make Rufus an intelligent idiot- he does stupid things, but he’s also aware of his limitations, and isn’t afraid to stand up for himself when he’s called out on said limitations.
As I said before, the story isn’t anything special on the outset: Rufus hates his home-life and wants to go somewhere better via some crazy scheme. In the cusp of doing so, he encounters a female member of Elysium called Goal whom he falls head over heels for. However, Goal is caught up in a conspiracy involving members of the Elysian military; a conspiracy that Rufus will have to unravel over the course of his adventure.
Those who have been following my reviews know that I like to avoid giving away too much in the way of synopsis recap for fear of spoiling the experience, so what I’ll say here is that a lot of the plot focuses on Rufus’s shenanigans in his attempts to help Goal, and those shenanigans happen to involve almost every member of Deponia.
One thing worth noting is how much I ended up remembering every NPC I encountered; some are three-dimensional, most aren’t, but all have this endearing quality brought about by them being smart in some capacity. At the risk of scribing an absolute statement, you really don’t encounter an incompetent side character- they’re all miles ahead of Rufus in terms of their awareness about their society, but concurrently aren’t pretentious about it, which is a relief: often times, when you have a dumb protagonist in a large cast, the writers go out of their way to either make half their other characters idiots ("Spongebob") or arrogantly stubborn ("Ed, Edd n Eddy"). It’s not that either of those approaches can’t work (love both those shows), but it was nice to see a different approach taken wherein you have smarter, wittier NPCs who aren’t verbally humiliating Rufus every second sentence. That being said, one flaw with the dialogue is that there are numerous typos in the speech bubbles (as in, they don't match what the character is saying, not that they contain grammatical errors).
Alright, I’ve spoken enough about that- onto a new category, the graphics. I noted this in my review of The Night of the Rabbit (https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/279054/), but Daedalic Entertainment has developed its own distinct art style since the Edna & Harvey days that is continued here, albeit with a thematic twist: characters have dark outlines with realistic body proportions and facial expressions; architecture is, as noted above, steampunky with wooden planks and iron paneling/pipes converging together to convey a DIY, scrapped-together aesthetic; and color grading is generally a medley of yellows and browns mixed with soft filters. The last area does transition to cooler hues like blue and teal, but everything remains industrialized and metallic regardless.
Overall, it is beautifully-rendered, but there are pitfalls to the schema. First and foremost is the hit-or-miss quality of the character models; most look fine, but there are a number of them (Gizmo [who looks like an older version of Jimmy from EEnE], the Mayor, the receptionist) that are downright hideous and brought back painful memories of Psychonauts. Secondly, the animation for walking feels out of place with the backdrops; I don’t quite know how to describe it, but it’s like Rufus and the others are moonwalking whenever they move from place-to-place, not actually making contact with the ground on them. The animation looks even more shoddy in the animated cutscenes, which honestly seem like they were made from Flash (i.e., they look cheap and out-of-place in this bigger budget video game, even with its comedic tone). Thirdly, there are only three facial expressions per a character, making their reactions repetitive. Fourth, the lip-syncing almost never matches the words being spoken on screen, more resembling warbling mouth movements from a bad ADR dub.
That critique makes a good transition to the sound, beginning with the voice acting, which is stellar. Kerry Shale is credited with voicing several characters in the game, the biggest one being Rufus, and he nails it. That balancing act I described in great detail above would not have mattered if the voice actor did not deliver on multiple fronts: conveying Rufus’s insecurities, superiority complex, intelligence, idiocy, and romantic confidence in one package. Shale does all that and more, giving Rufus a slight lisp and high-strung demeanor countered by an easygoing, cocky vocalization. My descriptions won’t do it any justice- you have to listen to his delivery yourself. Everyone else does a great job, and real kudos has to be given to the voice directors- in a lot of ways, Deponia feels like the opposite of Syberia. In that game, I felt that the voice actors recorded their lines in individual booths independent from the other, and then their performances were played side-by-side without any direction whatsoever. Here, it comes off like real interplay, which I doubt actually happened- instead, what you have is strong directors who successfully got their voice artists to get in the mindset that they were engaged in a conversation with the other actor, thereby making it all sound so natural. And keep in mind, there is a TON of dialogue in the title: that there are no lapses in this quality is something worth praising. Even Rufus’s item descriptions contain gems of amusement.
The sound design, on the other hand, is pretty weak. Nothing stands out, and things that do are blatantly stock noises triggered to play the exact same version every time it's initiated (i.e., the crane/gate/drawers make the same din). Like the snap of the Marquis de Hoto’s fingers in The Night of the Rabbit, the only stock noise I really enjoyed was the swapping whenever Rufus combines two items.
The music was mixed. Despite the steampunk vistas, you don’t get anything steampunk or industrial-sounding. Instead, you get pretty generic beats that delineate between screens to either another mediocre tune that sounds like it was made through some online music creator, or nothing at all. Props should be given to having multiple tracks per an area instead of one overarching motif, but I can’t say anything but the main theme was memorable (and that was for a different reason- I found it more grating than enjoyable). I hope I’m not sounding too harsh, especially since I can’t create music to save my life, but considering how good "The Night of the Rabbit’s" OST could be, I felt resident Daedalic composer Finn Seliger had the potential to do better here.
Finally, we get to the gameplay. Daedalic has pioneered a system wherein you can do everything (except save/load files) through the mouse. Left click interacts, right click observes, and the mouse wheel allows you to bring up your inventory easily.
In PnCs, gameplay is always going to be simplistic from a controller standpoint. What we need to examine is whether the exploration, item gathering, and puzzle solving is enjoyable or hair-ripping inducing. Compared to Night of the Rabbit and (especially) Grim Fandango, Deponia’s progression is a lot more palatable. Honestly, the thing that really helps is that most of the game’s sections are centered on a few areas, making the puzzles easier to get a grasp of since you have less areas and less interactable objects to use from your inventory overall. Not to keep drawing comparisons to it, but The Night of the Rabbit’s issue was that, for the most part, you had a large overworld to walk between. Deponia’s most aggravating section is the town of Kuvaq which, uncoincidentally, contains the most sub-areas of all the sections.
That being said, what I will say is that Deponia is not a title you can rush through, and I do feel that I would’ve enjoyed even Kuvaq more had I taken my time and not attempted to get through it quickly. There are some contrived solutions, but there were a lot that I know I would not have had to look up if I had just paid attention to the conversations or item observations or even visual cues (okay, that one was a bit too far). I say all this as a plea to those reading this review who are potentially interested in playing Deponia- take your time and really pay attention to what is being conveyed in text.
Now, the one gameplay element I won’t defend are the minigames strewn throughout that often have you solving some small-scale puzzle, ranging from putting together a jigsaw puzzle of stained glass to rearranging track circuits. Not a single one, let me repeat, not a single one of them was fun. They were tedious, boring, and pointless. I think the creators realized this halfway through because you are literally given the option to skip most of them instantly. I’m always up for a change in gameplay (as happened with Dark Room, see my review here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/RedBackLoggd/review/279158/), but that gameplay change needs to be enjoyable and it wasn’t here.
So, overall, what do you get with Deponia? You get a very charming release from Daedalic Entertainment, and the first entry in arguably their most popular franchise. The story is funny and keeps you jubilant through masterful direction and scripting that successfully gives you a jackass who is likeable and brought to life by a great performer. The gameplay has aged pretty well (minus a few parts that may require you to consult a walkthrough) and the graphical style is pleasant on the eyes (minus some ugly NPC models). The cast is great, but the sound design and score fail to live up to that standard. Finally, the pacing is strong and never drags out things unnecessarily.
There have been reports from gamers who played the game on Steam that there are bugs present. I personally did not experience any, but take it into consideration should you choose to purchase this. It took me over 7 hours to beat Deponia, which makes it a steal at a $10.00 price tag (even cheaper if you purchase it as part of the Daedalic Adventure Bundle). There are some growing pains, but the experience is agreeable for the most part.