Deponia is an adventure game in the classic tradition. It has all the hallmarks that we’ve come to expect from a modern click-adventure, but unfortunately keeps some of the hallmarks that other contemporary entrants have rightly moved past.
The strength of Deponia is in its narrative elements. The artwork is great, in a cartoon style that fits the characters and plot well, the dialog is clever, and the plot is unique and sort of compelling, despite the inherent goofiness. The protagonist accidentally has a hand in getting a girl thrown from a train which was taking her back to her home on Elysium, the city that floats above the garbage world of Deponia. He then takes on, as his quest, the task of waking her and helping her get home, with the hope that she will take him with her out of Deponia, and hopefully to Elysium, where he may see his father again. It’s relatable and touching, but some of this is spoiled by characters which are not entirely likable. The redemption of the characters then comes as even a bit sweeter. In the meantime, however, no one who meets the protagonist likes him—and that persistent sense of being disliked rankles after a while. Many of the puzzles in the game involve tricking, distracting, or drugging the townsfolk to get them to stop actively hindering progress. It gets a bit old, and feels like the writers were phoning it in a bit.
The most fun, interesting character to interact with is the postal robot. Make sure to ask him about his 'unlatched replacement postal cat hatch'.
The actual mechanics of the game are right on, though nothing to win any awards. The basic run of the game is, as expected, to click on various things in the correct order to solve the obstacles in the protagonist’s way. This system is handled about as well as it can be. The inventory system is intuitive and accessible, using the mouse wheel to speed item use.If one gets a bit stuck, holding down the middle mouse button reveals everything which is interactive on the screen, and exhausting dialog and exploration options usually reveals all the clues one needs to pass the obstacle. It all flows together pretty nicely, and very little seems like busy work.
The inventory drops down from the top of the screen with a flick of the mouse wheel.
Not all of the puzzles are entirely intuitive, however. I hate to invoke direct comparison, but I have to compare the puzzles here to recent Telltale games. When you play Secret of Monkey Island or Walking Dead, a couple of very different approaches to the click-adventure, their puzzles have this thing in common: they make sense. If you simply consider your options long enough and talk to enough NPCs, the puzzles fall together. Deponia, however, returns to the feel of some past adventure games, in which the solutions to some puzzles are simply so obscure and so nonsensical, one wonders how anyone was intended to solve it. Not every puzzle is like this, but a few are, and it only takes one too-obscure puzzle to ruin the immersion. Once I reach a point where I cannot move forward without either trying every single possible combination until I find the nonsense that works or simply looking up the answer somewhere, the rest of the game is tainted by this. The balance of making puzzles which are complicated enough to make them challenging and interesting to solve without making them so tough that the player has to resort to brute force is is very delicate and difficult to reach—I get that—but it’s still so that some of Deponia’s puzzles tip the scale in the wrong direction. Of course, I wouldn’t think anything of it if it weren’t for Telltale, since before their games, I didn’t think it was possible to hit the balance spot on.
As an example of a too-obscure moment: When our hero needs to swipe some items from the store, he has to poison the shop-keeper with a tranq-dart. He can't just throw it at her though, he has to use a tube of some kind to blow it at her. After searching for a tube for ages, I finally just tried combining every item in my inventory until I discovered that the funnel I was carrying will work as a dart-tube, which is preposterous at best.
Some players like this sort of buffoonery, however, so take it as you will.
The game also presents some mini-games which are rather straightforward—the first is a knight-move puzzle for example—but some are skippable if you don’t feel like solving them, which I felt was an interesting mercy to players who feel like they shouldn’t have to solve any non-inventory based puzzles.
There are plenty of well-illustrated locations to visit.
Overall, the game is stylish, but otherwise uninspired. Fans of rather obscure inventory puzzles will get a kick out of it, especially if they don’t mind the occasional need to brute-force a puzzle or two. I would not, however, say that this is a game for everyone.
Deponia is available now on Steam for $19.99 for both Windows and Mac.
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