Chaos on Deponia
no thanks!
I have three of the four Deponia games somewhere in my library. Due to the way they’ve been titled they’re all under different letters, and the second in the series, Chaos in Deponia, happens to be the first that I’ve hit upon. I’ve spent eighty minutes with it. Here are my thoughts, divided helpfully into two sections to avoid any confusion.
What I liked: The colourful artwork, the detailed scene backgrounds, and the notion of a setting an adventure game on a floating landfill city.
What I didn’t like: It stakes everything on being funny, but it is not funny. The dialogue chains and puzzles alike are 95% gags, often overly long gags, almost none of which land. Sometimes this is because the gag takes several sentences to play out when the punchline is obvious from the first. Sometimes it is because the gag involves a larger-than-reasonable suspension of disbelief, such as in the opening scene when Rufus commits a series of disastrous blunders (including murdering a pet bird), while two old people carry out a conversation about him in the same room, somehow not noticing that he’s set the kitchen on fire. More often (though sometimes it can be difficult to untangle this from the timing-related problems) it is because the gag has nothing funny about it in the first place, such as how the only recurring female character is predictably given a damsel role and, at the point I decided I had seen enough, was being set up for an extended unpredictable/split-personality joke, because, supposedly, WOMEN, who knows what they want, aren’t they just? YKNOW. etc. Elsewhere, some jokes try for a self-conscious/meta “this is an adventure game trope” thing, though these largely come off as insecure, cheap and lazy, probably because they never feel like they’re trying to say anything about the process of making games so much as they’re trying to fill space where the writer couldn’t think of something better. This is how it seems, anyway.
The main character – Rufus – is terrible company, clumsily stupid in the vein of, say, Fry from Futurama but with none of the endearing self-depreciation, or signs of caring for other people or, like, anything at all that makes him in anyway redeemable. Presumably Rufus’s obnoxious stupidity is meant to be something we’re in on, laughing at rather than with, but having to be with Rufus all the time, in combination with the perpetually unfunny dialogue and puzzles, begins to feel like the joke is indeed on the player, and it feels just kind of sad and mean, not to mention very tiring. Rufus is possibly even more unlikable than Samuel Gordon from Black Mirror – the last protagonist I truly hated, for those playing along at home – but I can’t bring myself to be angry at Rufus in the same way, because I don’t feel like I really even understand what his function is, here.
An aside, no matter how I tweaked the settings, I couldn’t get it to run full-screen, it just remained in its weird pseudo-full screen window. Probably this is something that could be fixed with some internet help, if I wanted to play more of this game.
Which I don’t. Hard pass on this.
About: Chaos on Deponia came out in November 2012, the same year of release as the original Deponia game. It was developed and published by prolific German studio Daedalic Entertainment, who we last encountered in 2017 via the Blackguards games. Surely, it’s only a matter of time before I find something of theirs to like.
The first three Deponia games were in the Humble Indie Bundle 15, back in October 2015, which I’d say I mainly got for Gang Beasts, but which - I also realise now - was a purchase I made the same day I began this very silly project. Was this it? Was this the bundle that tipped me over the edge? Did I look at these games and think to myself “fuck I’ll never get round to playing all these Deponia games… unless…”. There’s probably a lesson here somewhere.
up next is Child of Light
