Goodbye Deponia Review

Daedalic Entertainment have a good whack of excellent point-and-click adventure games under their belt. With outstanding titles like Edna & Harvey: The Breakout, The Whispered World, and personal favourite, The Night of the Rabbit, they are quickly becoming a well-respected name in the genre, and rightly so.

A great sense of humour runs throughout their offerings, hand-in-hand with wonderful story-telling and exceptional voice acting. This sense of humour has most definitely made an appearance in the Deponia series, however in a more sinister way than the norm we have come to know and love from this developer.

If you haven’t played Deponia or Chaos on Deponia, please don’t attempt Goodbye Deponia. In a game series that is already sporadic and haphazard, starting at the last part of what is really one game split into three will confuse and frustrate you. Also there are many, many jokes that rely on the player’s familiarity with the games, and to get the most, you’ll really want to understand them all.

If you have played the previous two titles and are looking to try the finale then you’re most likely a fan of Deponia and its ultra-quirky, dirty-steampunk feel. It is somewhat like a cartoon version of Tatooine, without the deserts, and played while on copious amounts of mind-altering, hallucination-triggering drugs, with some absinthe thrown in for good measure. Not that that is a good idea. Obviously.

Goodbye Deponia starts directly where Chaos on Deponia left off and continues to follow the hero (or rather anti-hero) Rufus, who is now on a mission to save Deponia from being destroyed. The planet, believed to be abandoned is actually, very much not so, and a huge cover up is in place to ensure the world goes boom. Rufus and gang are attempting to reach Elysium, the floating utopian-type city in order to warn them of the thousands of people still alive on the planet, but are inevitably swept off course in a series of events that you literally couldn’t dream up.

Rufus is probably the most unlikeable protagonist ever to grace a point-and-click adventure. Arrogant, oblivious, crude, childish and irritating, he’s like Han Solo with all the good parts stripped away (yes another Star Wars reference). It does make for an interesting ride through Deponia, playing as someone you feel you can’t like, however it has the potential to ostracize you from the plot, keeping you at arms-length and stopping the same sort of blissful “lost in” haze you might experience in The Night of the Rabbit.

The puzzles are often as random as the game itself, and at times very obscure indeed. In a world which is made of junk, literally anything has the potential to be used, or combined with something else, and that can make it tricky to work out what to do next. This also has the effect of detaching you from the storytelling, especially at the beginning, which is unfortunate as those first few vital strands of plot are what developers should be using to draw you in and entangle you in their web.

What does draw you in though, are, well... the drawings. The game’s visuals are, as standard from a Daedalic offering, impeccable. Attention to detail, like the droplets of water on a steaming broken pipe to the priceless look on a pelican’s face as you bring havoc to his mundane world. Even the items in the inventory are all excellent, exuding character and matching the vibe of the game perfectly. Everything helps you imagine Deponia as a real life place, breathing waste and mediocrity borderlining on sheer ruin.

The voice acting reflects this same disheveled feeling. The people, while believeable and each one memorable, are not really engaging. There is not one to become attached to, leaving it quite difficult to care for the characters and their plight. That is not to say its bad, because it isn’t, they’ve achieved the perfect representation of the slumminess of Deponia, it’s just not... emotive.

Whilst the mixture of mischievous and malevolent humour works well within this series, and in this case Goodbye Deponia, it does need to be mentioned that there are occasions where this is actually more uncomfortable than funny. Within the opening moments of the game there is a female android malfunctioning and the joke is made that she is experiencing her time of the month, thus explaining her bout of the crazies. Whilst this is not outright offensive, the joke of women on their period acting crazy is overdone and quite simply no longer funny. It is likely that very few will laugh at this, and more likely that it will distance a lot of the female audience.

Other rather awkward moments include a very scantily-clad black woman enslaved and forced to perform as a dancing monkey. Unsurprisingly, there is genuine disbelief that this made it into the game, even if it is unintentional it seems like a huge oversight on Daedalic’s part. Deliberately leading children to a pedophile and plentiful jokes at the expense of the female characters may leave you feeling that the developers have gone just one step too far.

All that aside, Goodbye Deponia is an okay, albeit somewhat dreary game, which captures the essence of what you would imagine the world of junk to be. If you’ve got this far in the series then you’ll no doubt enjoy this final part, but as a whole this is only slightly above average. Daedalic remain a fantastic team of developers and a here’s hoping a they’ve got a life-changing point-and-click waiting for us just around the corner.