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by flotsam
Rufus is back, a little more brash, intent on stopping the destruction
of Deponia. Goal is too, except its three, a product of her brain
implant going wonky and Rufus being Rufus.
If you missed the first game, a little prologue will catch you up, and
if you played the first one then you know exactly what to expect. Pointy
and clicky and inventory based, 2D animated and firmly rooted in the
Monkey Island branch of the genre. It has its heart in the right place,
but for me it tried too hard.
Not in the puzzling, which is typical fetch and use, and not in the
mini-games, which can be skipped if you want. There is lots to do, often
requiring many parts to obtain a solution, and not all of it in a
straight line, which is a good thing. Importantly, most of it was fun.
While overall it was perhaps a little easy, it ensures things keep
rolling along.
The trying too hard was in the humour, and to some extent the dialogue.
Lots of it (the latter) bogged things down at times, and some
repetitiveness didn’t help. By and large though I think wordy is ok,
depending of course on the words. Here, lots of words were used in the
pursuit of being funny, and whilst I chuckled at times, my overall
one-word impression was not funny, but strained.
Crass at times too, although I can do crass. It just added however to
that “must be funny” feeling.
Spunky
There were more characters in this game, and not just because there were
three Goals. I liked all of them, and switching back and forth and
cajoling and conniving with each persona added a little something. All
the kings horses...
There were platypuses (platypi?) as well, one more of them than there
were Goals. As a down under dweller, games with duckbills have instant
cred, or at least a bit more than if the duckbills are absent. Good
thing though it was the dolphins that were armed. You can’t trust a
platypus with a torpedo.
Time travelling gets a look in, which has always been a favourite
pastime, and I never fail to enjoy a good Cucumber of Revelation. A
willing suspension of disbelief will come in handy, but you learn a fair
bit about what is going/has gone on. I played for a lot longer than the
plot progressed, but that is generally part and parcel of these sorts of
games. By the end though, things were set up nicely for the next game.
Baby
I must confess I haven’t really warmed to Rufus. I don’t dislike him,
but he seems a little too self-centred to me. His intentions though are
good, and I suspect he is a product of his environment.
Much of the game takes place in the Floating Black Market, a sprawling
place with more than a few locations to visit. You get to visit Elysium
early on, and a few other places later in the game. It is all well
drawn, and the visual style suits the quirkiness of the settings and the
quirkier nature of the goings on.
The interface is simple to use, the left and right mouse buttons being
used to access and activate the various icons that provide your actions
in the game world. You can reveal hotspots with a press of the space
bar, which will also pause cutscenes, and you can tweak most of the
settings and choose subtitles or not.
Lady
I reckon it took about 10 hours to play, although those ten hours were
drawn out by the vicissitudes of real life, hence the delayed nature of
this review. Thinking about it, I could have used a cranky torpedo
wielding platypus.
There are some nice little homages to games of the past, which if you
don’t get doesn’t matter.
Despite what might sound like a bunch of negatives, there is a lot to
like in Chaos on Deponia, especially if you like these types of games.
Its bright, breezy and suitable chaotic, and you don’t have to like
everything about a game to have fun. Which I did, and I will come back.
It did enough to make me want to see how it ends, which is a good note
on which to end.
Grade: B
I played on:
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel i7-3820 4GHz
RAM: 12GB Ripjaw DDR3 2133 Mhz
Video card: AMD Radeon HD 7800 2048MB
GameBoomers Review Guidelines
June 2013
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