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.

This game features an especially annoying protagonist who embodies what I would describe as the worst personality traits I have found in men. The supporting characters are all often equally unlikable. It has a story that doesn't seem to make much sense. Certainly, a lot about it is never explained. Like, what planet are they even on? The puzzles were often absurd and had nothing to do with logic but rather with just trying every combination of thing to get the right one. I frequently ran into issues where even a walkthrough couldn't help me because I didn't trigger this other thing that there was no clue was necessary in a previous screen. It got so bad that I thought I had run into a game-breaking bug a few times. In short, I absolutely hated it. I don't even know how it ended up in my account. I do like plenty of inventory/environment pixelated point and click puzzle games so maybe I bought it?

Anyway, I don't recommend and I won't play the sequel. I finished it only because it was the D in my alphabet challenge.

The only nice thing I can say about it is that, at times, it felt like I was playing an old Doctor Who episode from before the reboot. That wasn't enough to get past the many negatives, though.