Deponia: The Complete Journey (2014)

I played this for an hour and i just didn't care for it. The animation is great and the setting is ok but that's about it. Some of the negative aspects of the game:

• Fullscreen and Windowed Mode both didn't work properly, i just get a smaller window stuck to the top left corner. I had to use Borderless Gaming to actually run this in Fullscreen.
• If you click/combine on something for the second time you can't just skip the entire dialogue, just single sentences.
• Even within the first hour there were several illogical interactions. A sock just disappears when washed. And you have to catch a toothbrush with... beans?
• You can't fast travel using a map, you have to go through every location, watching Rufus walk to the exit.
• No buttons to skip puzzles or get hints.

I could live with all of these flaws if the game was engaging enough. But the story unfolds too slowly, i don't care about any NPCs and actively dislike the main character. The whole 'post-apocalyptic junkyard' setting also reminds me of Primordia, a far more interesting and charming adventure game.

What a waste! This game could have been so much better with improved writing and a more insightful social attitude. It’s faults are painfully sad. Even though I found some humour, fun puzzles and an interesting alternative world to discover, the main character is a narcissistic leaching psychopath void of empathy. Not a fun nor sophisticated character to play. It takes away from any attempt at humour, because of the deliberate disregard he has for others. By design it’s impossible to take anything away from this game. Which in turn makes playing it utterly pointless.

Many games offer sophisticated humour, invoke ethical thought, critical thinking, even ambiguous ethical dilemmas. Deponia, however, is game that promotes toxic masculinity, upheaves rape culture and is unforgivably socially backwards, totally dismantling any of it’s qualities. This game lacks insight, is cheap, unenlightening and a huge disappointment. It’s blatantly obvious they wanted to create an adventure akin to Monkey island, but they couldn’t be more off.

The female characters were particularly poorly written or made nonexistent (e.g. sleeping), degrading the storyline. Considering the game is from 2012, this lack of insight quickly became an annoyance. I’ve seen more impressive and socially progressive work from the nineties. This game was such a let down. Despite the game having themes concerning subjects like dystopia, inequality, resource scarcity, callousness and lack of empathy, non of these issues were actually addressed. Instead, commentary was left to an uninsightfull narcissist, who superficially started to feel a little bad as the game progressed. There was no depth to this story. The main female character was treated as a commodity the entire time and was constantly manipulated. All female characters were constantly being sedated/drugged if they were inconvenient, e.g. had independent wants, needs or interests of their own.

It’s such a shame, because the world created could have had such potential if scripting had been better and if a higher level of social awareness would have been incorporated.