![]() ![]() This happens early on in the first game, and later mostly in the third game. You’ll collect items at a quick pace and have no idea what to do with them because you aren’t that far into the story yet. What seems bad, and happens in all three of the games, is the inventory glut. For the most part though, the puzzles aren’t that bad. One particular puzzle in the second game requires (small hinty spoiler) thinking so far out-of-the-box that it’s practically outside of the game. You will be randomly clicking and combining. Speaking of puzzles, those are… a mixed bag. Pathfinding was never an issue, and the occasional cinematic animations blend smoothly and are usually the puzzle-solved, story-progressed treat they should be. They’re skippable, but just do them they’re quick, and they do add to the experience. ![]() And don’t worry about the tutorials at the start of each of the three games. A large variety of different mini games are interspersed through this otherwise point-and-click title, and they work quite well in context. My greatest annoyance is that long pauses in spoken dialog are unskippable, but I particularly liked the (unmentioned) feature of being able to use the middle mouse button to identify hotspots. There are, as mentioned, bugs here and there, but they are likely due to programmer/scripter errors rather than faults of the engine. The game engine for Deponia is pretty robust. It baffles me whenever Goal (the “damsel in distress” for the series) forgives him for the things he does, and gives me a greater appreciation for unlikable characters whom you do root for in other games. ![]() I assume some of this is just a showcase of German humor, and I know a lot of the dialog isn’t quite right because of the translation from German to English, but no matter what language it’s in, I’m just glad that nearly every other character in the game also hates Rufus. In the third, the developers throw in some additional misogyny, borderline racism (by the writers, not by Rufus himself), and implied paedophilia for good measure. By the second game, you might instead be convinced that Rufus is an awful person, and you start to wonder if you should still be rooting for him. He’s lazy, and selfish, but you can still root for his perseverance. There’s good backstory on his misguided attempts to escape the (literally) junk planet he lives on, and how those attempts continually cause destruction around him. The first game is a good introduction to the main character, Rufus. Thankfully this was the only game-breaking bug I ran into, although there were many other bugs. This didn’t take terribly long since I already knew what to do, and so it’s the work-around I’d recommend. On the suggestion of someone else on the Steam forum, I simply re-played the game up to that puzzle a second time (this will have been my third time through the intro puzzles…). ![]() Apparently this bug occurs only in The Complete Journey, and not in the stand-alone game, but if you get to a pigeon puzzle that seems inexplicably unsolvable, the official recommendation is to download a save from the Daedalic web site where you don’t know what else has already been done or solved. And then I had to restart it again because of a game-breaking bug in one of the puzzles. I got a small way into the first of the three games a year or so ago (“Deponia”, “Chaos on Deponia”, and “Goodbye Deponia” are collected into one title for “The Complete Journey”), but I restarted it completely for this playthrough. I’d heard a few small warnings about the main character, but it still wasn’t quite the experience I’d imagined when I set out to play it. On the whole, I feel like I can be happy I played it, and I can probably even call it a good game, but there’s a number of glaring annoyances that bring it down and others that even make me hesitant to ever recommend it. Deponia: The Complete Journey (2012-2013 / 2014)Īn SG win from almost exactly three years ago, it’s difficult to create a cohesive write-up for “Deponia: The Complete Journey” when my impressions of it are so conflicted. ![]()
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