A challenging and good-looking point-and-click game with funny dialogues. Subtle hints are also provided to solve most puzzles.
Type: Single-player
Genre: Point and Click
Developer: Daedalic Entertainment
Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
Release date: 7 Aug, 2012
Intro
Deponia is the first part of the Deponia series, starring Rufus, an egoistical, self-centric guy who is looking to escape from the place he is in. While it seems to have a good premise, an episodic game always meant one thing: the story will be continued in other games. The question is, is it still worth playing the game despite that? More on the review.
Graphics
The game has good-looking visuals. The backgrounds have a lot of attention to the details and characters have a unique look from each other. All actions and expressions are also animated to make them more expressive.
Story
It’s hard to make out the story at first. The game keeps on telling about how the main character wants to leave the place he is in without any reason. There isn’t even a mention about where he wants to go until you spend a few hours in the game. Everything will come together as you continue playing the game – the game will explain more of the world-building while giving more objectives to complete.
To be honest, there isn’t much of the story. The only thing that entertains me was the conversations between the characters since Rufus, the main character, is such an egotistical person that is willing to do anything to reach his goal, even if it means bringing havoc to the entire village. Some optional dialogues are also available when you are talking to some characters either for laughs or more background of the story.
What surprises me is that the game voice dubbed all of the dialogues. Although the game offers a subtitle, it seems to automatically advance the dialogues after the characters finished talking. It soon becomes a problem when I tried to progress the text slightly after the game does it automatically since it will advance the next dialogue in response.
The Game
Point and Click
Despite being a point-and-click game, I didn’t enjoy its point-and-click elements. I had no idea what to do most of the time since most solutions are quite vague. Hints are also too subtle to notice that I had to try almost every item in my inventory to solve a solution every time. Sadly, it didn’t work every time since some solutions require some thinking to solve.
Some items are also well-hidden that you need to hover your mouse around very carefully to find them. Some are very small, some are hidden in a certain place that is hard to notice. Luckily, the difficulty seems to be easier from the middle of the game; some solutions become more linear and characters seem to give more hints about what you are supposed to do next.
Puzzles
The game also has some puzzles that you need to solve. Just like the point-and-click section, subtle hints are provided to solve the puzzles, although it’s still hard to notice most of the time unless you know what you were doing. Luckily, the game is forgiving enough to give an option to skip the puzzles if you choose to do so. You need to look for the skip button first though since the button is not obvious.
Length and Replayability
I finished the game in 8h. Most of my playtime was spent figuring out how to continue the game due to its difficulty. There is no reason to replay the game except to get a certain achievement where you need to finish the game in Droggeljug mode, a mode where every dialogue and voice dub are replaced by “Droggeljug” word. It was funny at first although it becomes annoying and boring as time goes.
Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Verdict
Despite the difficulty, Deponia was a fun game. The dialogues are funny, the voice dubs are expressive, and the animations are smooth. The song that was played at the beginning of each chapter is also a nice addition to the game. It’s definitely a game that you need to enjoy because of its dialogue and presentation, not the gameplay.
