Opening up a huge number of locations all at once, you begin with a daunting number of options, all the act's puzzles dumped on you at once, and often leaving you solving things in the wrong order. However, thankfully the voice cast is really strong, and despite being given some tough dialogue to work with, they generally do a great job.īut that second act really is a thorn in the game. Mad translations make a couple of the puzzles utterly bewildering, one going on about a "mauve muff" that has nothing to do with any of the word's meanings with which I'm familiar. Those are extreme moments, but the sense that you're not hearing the words as they were intended is pretty pervasive, and - as has always been the case with Daedalic games - often leaves you thinking, "Oh, I see, they meant." rather than just laughing at the gag. At one point I put a deflated balloon in a furnace (the correct solution was of course to have the balloon be inflated) and was insanely told, "Hehe, it tasted of window putty anyway." Perhaps the most bemusing was near the end, when clicking glowing candyfloss on any other inventory item, and hearing, "I guess the eye has to dine out tonight if it wants to be pleased." Opening a box near the beginning of the game I was told, "Phew, it looked much lighter lying in that cupboard." There was no cupboard. Quite clearly enormous amounts of the dialogue have received a far too literal translation, as if stuffed through Google Translate, and you end up with absolute nonsense. It's always hard to know how much has suffered in the transition from German to English. And unfortunately, most of those came clumped together in the second (and longest) of four acts. Despite translation issues - and there are plenty - the game made me laugh a fair few times, and a number of the puzzles, while in no way original, presented a fair challenge. And as you also might expect, the game is packed with eccentric characters, dozens of objects to steal and use on other objects, and a hefty pile of jokes.Īnd it hits reasonably often. Do that, the story advances, and you repeat. It's an absolutely standard point-and-click affair - gather various inventory items, each hidden behind dialogue and puzzles, to solve a larger problem. Not quite so cutesy and fairytale-themed as the former, and sharing the slightly more aggressive humour of the latter, you play Rufus, a selfish and lazy man determined to find a way off the trash planet of Deponia. From Daedalic, they who brought us the lovely Whispered World, and the not so lovely Edna & Harvey, Deponia falls stylistically somewhere between the two. However, it's pretty much impossible not to warm to a game that opens with a song. That, and what are now familiar problems with the translation from German. And by the same accounts, has all the same issues that we tend to forget. Deponia, by all accounts, is every bit as good as many of the adventures back in the day.
And yet it's so hard not to measure a modern point and click to the near-fictional memory of the past. I know this because I've gone back to play them, and either games can erode over time, or they're mostly not nearly as amazing as I remember (with the exception of those LucasArts few). I know that I misremember the adventures of the 90s. You can't refuse to find out - I promise it won't be a waste of your time.
Set on a planet made of trash, will it prove to be a big pile of rubbish, or a diamond in a dungheap. Deponia is released today - the latest adventure from German developers, Daedalic Entertainment.
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