Deponia is a game that I
regret buying for the most part. I can't really blame one other than
myself though. Well, aside from the game developers that is. Since if it
was a better game I might have had a more enjoyable time actually
playing it.
The
game is fairly faithful rendition of older style point and click
adventure games, which some may view as its greatest strength and its
most glaring weakness. But we will get back to that later. Deponia was
developed and published by Daedalic Entertainment, a German game development company, and its playable exclusively on the PC through the Windows or Mac OS.
Point
and click adventures games as a genre gave a lot to the industry as
they were some of the very first video games developed due to their low
technical requirements. As technology improved the genre as a whole has
lost a significant amount of its popularity, but it still chugs along
with a few stand outs like the Monkey Island and the Walking Dead
series. That is neither here or there though. What is important is that
this evolution has narrowed down the reasons people play adventure games
to few specific factors: The aesthetics, the narrative and the puzzles.
Lets start with the narrative. I can't say I'm a big fan of the story in Deponia, I think I can pretty confidently even say that I don't like it. I'm not sure if this is fair of me, but I think a factor that affected this game was the fact that the narrative was written first in German and then translated to other languages, and I feel that something was lost in the translation. Then again it might be fair since to criticize the game's translation since I've played tons of games that were originally written in Japanese and they were great. It was pretty strange going through this experience, but I'm sure tons of non-English speakers have gone through the same thing though when playing game that were made in English and then translated to other languages. The end result of this was that I felt that many if not most of the jokes were very flat and unfunny, the dialogue felt unnatural and separated from the characters. I hard a larger issue with the overall story of the game that I can't really blame on translation, just bad structuring. The ending in the game particularly left a bad taste in my mouth since it gave me no closure, the game just of ended with the main protagonist not having achieved his goal yet or even having achieved something of significance. It just kind of ended and told you to buy the sequel. This might have worked if I had liked the story but like I said before I didn't so all I was left feeling in the end was this kind of emptiness regarding the story and a pretty strong feeling that I didn't want to play another game from the Deponia series. There were even some instances that my apathy towards the game almost got me to stop playing it which is an issue in my opinion since the game is only a couple of hours long. Thankfully, my completionist habits got the best of me and I made it through to the end.
Deponia wasn't all bad though. Its puzzles and aesthetics were actually quite good. The hand drawn style of the game in my opinion is the factor that contributes the most towards this game actually have a unique character and personality. The use of color is great, the lines are clean and it reminded me of the same drawing techniques used in Monkey Island 3 which is one of my favorite games. There is a bit of an issue with the character design in the game, due to the game being written in German first the mouths of the characters sometimes feel out of sync with the dialog although the severity of this issue does vary wildly in the game. Its not something that broke the game, but it definitely does take you out of the experience of playing the game. Something else that was a bit lack luster was the background music in the game, I found it quite distracting and in some cases very annoying with the music becoming an active determent to my experience of the game. I'm pretty sure I muted the game for a good two hours of the six hours it took me to actually finish it.
Thankfully, for the most part those aspects doesn't play that big of a role with regard to the puzzles that are quite clever and very organic in nature. This is something I appreciate as I'm not a big fan of the item dance that happens in most adventure games where you would be forced on multiple occasions to start attempting to combine everything in your inventory with each other and everything in the game world because you're stuck. This doesn't mean that I didn't do that in Deponia, it happened, but not often enough for me to get mad and start blaming the game for bad design instead of accepting that I wasn't thinking of the puzzle in the correct manner. What I didn't like though was that for some reason the developers paired certain achievements with you being able to guess a puzzle correctly on the first go. This seemed really unfair to me since they were essentially forcing players to either play the game twice in order to get this achievement or at the very least be forced to load a previous save once they did figure it out to get that achievement and I can tell you from looking at the Steam achievement stats, where less than 15% of players bothered to get these achievements, that this did not work in extending the amount of time players spent with the game. I'm sure it just left them resentful, much the same way it left me.
Point and click adventure game in my opinion stand on three pillars as a genre, narrative, game aesthetics and the puzzle complexity. If any of these pillars suffers it could entirely break the game and make a bland if not a terrible experience. This is what happened in Deponia with its narrative that just utterly failed the game's mostly good puzzle and aesthetic design. I just found that I was never engaged with the protagonist or the overall narrative which lead me to simply turn off the game on multiple occasions because I just got bored of the entire affair. The worst part was that even when I finally did finish the game I was given that utterly vapid void of an ending that brings closure to nothing and essentially demands that I play the next Deponia game to get a better picture of the narrative, which just isn't going to happen when I couldn't give a rats ass about anything going on to begin with. I definitely saw the potential in Deponia and I saw the reasons people like it, but I can't in good conscious bring myself to anything other than warn people not to play this game. This is something that I hate to do to game's since I'm a big adherent to the philosophy that a game can be good regardless of how long it is, but for 19.99 a six hour experience just isn't good value for money for the player and that isn't acceptable in my opinion especially when its a mediocre experience at best.
Lets start with the narrative. I can't say I'm a big fan of the story in Deponia, I think I can pretty confidently even say that I don't like it. I'm not sure if this is fair of me, but I think a factor that affected this game was the fact that the narrative was written first in German and then translated to other languages, and I feel that something was lost in the translation. Then again it might be fair since to criticize the game's translation since I've played tons of games that were originally written in Japanese and they were great. It was pretty strange going through this experience, but I'm sure tons of non-English speakers have gone through the same thing though when playing game that were made in English and then translated to other languages. The end result of this was that I felt that many if not most of the jokes were very flat and unfunny, the dialogue felt unnatural and separated from the characters. I hard a larger issue with the overall story of the game that I can't really blame on translation, just bad structuring. The ending in the game particularly left a bad taste in my mouth since it gave me no closure, the game just of ended with the main protagonist not having achieved his goal yet or even having achieved something of significance. It just kind of ended and told you to buy the sequel. This might have worked if I had liked the story but like I said before I didn't so all I was left feeling in the end was this kind of emptiness regarding the story and a pretty strong feeling that I didn't want to play another game from the Deponia series. There were even some instances that my apathy towards the game almost got me to stop playing it which is an issue in my opinion since the game is only a couple of hours long. Thankfully, my completionist habits got the best of me and I made it through to the end.
Deponia wasn't all bad though. Its puzzles and aesthetics were actually quite good. The hand drawn style of the game in my opinion is the factor that contributes the most towards this game actually have a unique character and personality. The use of color is great, the lines are clean and it reminded me of the same drawing techniques used in Monkey Island 3 which is one of my favorite games. There is a bit of an issue with the character design in the game, due to the game being written in German first the mouths of the characters sometimes feel out of sync with the dialog although the severity of this issue does vary wildly in the game. Its not something that broke the game, but it definitely does take you out of the experience of playing the game. Something else that was a bit lack luster was the background music in the game, I found it quite distracting and in some cases very annoying with the music becoming an active determent to my experience of the game. I'm pretty sure I muted the game for a good two hours of the six hours it took me to actually finish it.
Thankfully, for the most part those aspects doesn't play that big of a role with regard to the puzzles that are quite clever and very organic in nature. This is something I appreciate as I'm not a big fan of the item dance that happens in most adventure games where you would be forced on multiple occasions to start attempting to combine everything in your inventory with each other and everything in the game world because you're stuck. This doesn't mean that I didn't do that in Deponia, it happened, but not often enough for me to get mad and start blaming the game for bad design instead of accepting that I wasn't thinking of the puzzle in the correct manner. What I didn't like though was that for some reason the developers paired certain achievements with you being able to guess a puzzle correctly on the first go. This seemed really unfair to me since they were essentially forcing players to either play the game twice in order to get this achievement or at the very least be forced to load a previous save once they did figure it out to get that achievement and I can tell you from looking at the Steam achievement stats, where less than 15% of players bothered to get these achievements, that this did not work in extending the amount of time players spent with the game. I'm sure it just left them resentful, much the same way it left me.
Point and click adventure game in my opinion stand on three pillars as a genre, narrative, game aesthetics and the puzzle complexity. If any of these pillars suffers it could entirely break the game and make a bland if not a terrible experience. This is what happened in Deponia with its narrative that just utterly failed the game's mostly good puzzle and aesthetic design. I just found that I was never engaged with the protagonist or the overall narrative which lead me to simply turn off the game on multiple occasions because I just got bored of the entire affair. The worst part was that even when I finally did finish the game I was given that utterly vapid void of an ending that brings closure to nothing and essentially demands that I play the next Deponia game to get a better picture of the narrative, which just isn't going to happen when I couldn't give a rats ass about anything going on to begin with. I definitely saw the potential in Deponia and I saw the reasons people like it, but I can't in good conscious bring myself to anything other than warn people not to play this game. This is something that I hate to do to game's since I'm a big adherent to the philosophy that a game can be good regardless of how long it is, but for 19.99 a six hour experience just isn't good value for money for the player and that isn't acceptable in my opinion especially when its a mediocre experience at best.
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