3/16/2023 0 Comments Deponia gamesHe is part of the lowest social class, doomed to live his life in literal mountains of trash. I don’t know what Chaos on Deponia holds but I’m hopeful that the series might mature with every new title.In Deponia, the world has degenerated into a vast garbage dump, in which the crotchety Rufus ekes out his sorry existence. If you’re more curious about the art style or the possibility of a humorous story, I’d suggest watching let’s play videos to get an idea of this glorified prologue. If you’re a fan of old-school adventure games that require stretches of the imagination and the strangest inventory items to solve, then I would recommend Deponia. Rufus might be a jerk but his interactions with a few characters in the last chapter of the game made me laugh (especially his conversation with a helpful boat captain that he keeps on accusing of being a pirate) and the narrative opened up enough to show the full potential of the series. I wish it hadn’t taken more than 10 hours of unfunny dialogue and confusing obstacles to get to the start of this tale but there were enough gems among the rubble to keep me invested. The part that surprises me about all these frustrations I had with Deponia is that I actually want to play the sequel to see how the story plays out. All the hotspots (there’s no pixel hunting here) for a screen can be cycled through with the R1 button and interacted with in multiple ways with the face buttons. The DualShock 4 controller is utilized quite well for a PC adventure game: the left analog stick moves Rufus whereas the right one moves the ‘mouse’ cursor. The new control scheme for the PS4 somehow made puzzle solving easier and harder at the same time. This is the calling card of a poorly designed adventure game. I ended up falling into the tried and true formula of using every item in my ever-expanding inventory on all interactive objects. Then I had to put it all back together again. That blowgun from earlier? I had to use the combined item to solve a puzzle where I needed the funnel in which it was disassembled. You’ll find items that won’t be used for a few hours later and you might even make an object that will have to be disassembled. You’ll find that the village of Kuvaq, which takes up a majority of the first half of the game, becomes a real slog. Rufus' ex, Toni, with her signature cigarette. For instance, a funnel, a dart and some tranquilizer are combined into a makeshift blowgun so you can drug Toni. But the puzzle design follows the obtuse history of logic from early adventure games. Most of the time the game gives you decent clues on what to do and on a few occasions, there are small environmental clues that add to the most interesting brain teasers. Speaking of that puzzle, it kind of underscores the weakest moments of the gameplay as well. Neither the acting nor the writing make this situation funny - it constantly took me out of the game to know I was playing as this creep. And you as Rufus are expected to tranquilize her and steal from her store to solve a convoluted puzzle later on. He even ‘accidentally’ killed her pet bird. Charlotte Moore reads her lines as mildly annoyed does not even come close to matching Rufus’ terrible treatment of her.īasically, Toni has given her slovenly ex a place to stay for free and all the while he mooches off her, refuses to do chores, and is needlessly mean to her. It looks like she’s supposed to be set up as the shrewish ex-girlfriend who constantly nags our hero. She is shown with a cigarette constantly hanging out of her mouth and a rough demeanor. The best example of Rufus’ obnoxiousness and Deponia’s tone-deafness around humor comes from his interactions with his ex, Toni. It’s necessary to have the subtitles on here to understand what the Chorus is saying, and even then, its usually nonsense passed off as humor. The accent on the actor is quite thick and songs are comprised of forced rhymes (‘paid’ does not sound like ‘said’) and garbled English. The character that strums on his guitar-like-thing during certain cutscenes looks, moves, and sounds bad. This is most evident in the singing Chorus that ushers Rufus through the course of the game. The (surprisingly) small amount of main characters are sufficiently portrayed to move the story along but miss the mark with the humor. The quality of the voice acting and the oddness of some of the written dialogue really is where Deponia suffers the most. It comes across as very lazy humor and this attitude isn’t limited to just the art. Every so often ‘Lotti’ will do a falsetto with her voice to try in vain to sound more feminine. For instance, the mayor’s secretary is a gruff looking (and sounding) man stuffed into a pink dress. There are other designs and choices that show just how outdated (or maybe cultural) some of the comedy is. That's Wenzel on the left, Gizmo in the middle, and Kuvaq's mayor on the right.
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