Chaos on Deponia - Review

I’ve always been a huge fan of point-and-click adventure games. Some of my very earliest memories were sitting next to my mum in the loungeroom, helping to solve fantastic little environmental puzzles in the PS1 release of Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars. Since the days of my youth, the genre has fallen by the wayside, with releases becoming few and far between, and major releases rarer still. But some companies are still churning them out, and German developer Daedalic Entertainment is one of them. The Deponia series is perhaps the biggest of these titles for the company… but I question whether it’s the best. In my time with the second game in the series on Switch, Chaos on Deponia, I have found myself frustrated, offended, and perhaps most of all, utterly exhausted. Full disclosure: I have not played the first Deponia game, but the opening of Chaos gives a pretty thorough explanation of its events. 

So let’s get into it. Chaos on Deponia follows the aloof hero Rufus and his love interest/macguffin Goal as they journey back to the floating city of Elysium — Goal’s homeland. Elysium is the upper echelon of society on the Earth-adjacent post-apocalyptic world of Deponia, a world which has been largely forgotten by the people of Elysium, who see the planet as little more than a waste disposal unit. After the events of the first game, Rufus and Goal run into some slight troubles, causing Goal to lose her memory, and leaving Rufus to come up with a way to restore her memories and make their way together to Elysium. Oh, and the bad guys from the first game are seemingly back, and threatening to put the whole of Deponia at risk. Again. 

If you’re a fan of the first game’s characterisation, great news! Chaos seems to hit a lot of the same notes here, with Rufus being his normal, reckless self, and Goal being a bit of a snob and largely unaware of what life is like on Deponia, with both getting into all kinds of mischief along the journey. The only salient difference is that Goal’s personality has been split into three separate but equally frustrating parts, and occasionally Rufus will have to switch through those personalities to find one that will help him in his current wacky situation. Unfortunately, I was not a fan of these characters, and that’s a big problem in a game that relies so heavily on its character-based storytelling. 

Let’s start with everyone but Rufus. We’ll come back to him. Most everyone I came across in Chaos seemed to share one general personality: snarky jerk with a distaste for other people. There are a few exceptions of course, but almost every single character I met was hitting those same familiar notes; it felt like an amateur improv production where the only guidance was “be snarky”. Goal’s three split personalities at the start of the game aren’t a great deal better, either, being split up into snooty, fancy, and toddler. 

And then we come to Rufus. Good god, Rufus. In my 24 years on this planet, I have played hundreds, maybe even thousands of games, and not a single one of them featured a primary protagonist as unlikable and horrible as Rufus. A part of me wonders if he was ghost-written by the worst users of 4Chan. He’s crass, rude, offensive, and very much indicative of the “edgy internet troll” mindset. Some of the things Rufus does and says, I can’t even mention in this review. It’s seriously just that horrendous. But I will give one example: quite early on in the game, Rufus comes across a pianist who happens to have dwarfism — a person of short stature resulting from a genetic or medical condition. Instead of, you know, being in any way respectful to this character, Rufus decides the appropriate response is to sing Heigh-Ho at him — the dwarfs work song from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That’s not funny, it’s not clever, it’s just pure and simple ableism, punching down for no other reason than to punch down. And that’s to say nothing of the astounding amount of misogyny, with Rufus saying things like he wished he had a remote control for his ex-girlfriend, or just generally following the mantra of “bitches be crazy”. It’s difficult to know whether this is the result of less-than-progressive writers, poor translation from its original German, or if it’s an attempt at creating an intentionally abrasive and horrendous character, but even if the latter is true, at a certain point, there’s a line that need not be crossed, and Chaos on Deponia dances on that line as if it were absent entirely. 

Mechanically, there’s little to dislike about Chaos on Deponia. Honestly, the best part of this game is that, unlike previous console editions of point-and-click games, you don’t feel like you’re playing a mechanically inferior port. The controls are well-adapted to a controller, with Rufus himself directly controllable with the left analogue stick, interactions mapped to various buttons, and a handy button to switch your focus from nearby items and characters — something less necessary on PC as you can just click on whatever you need. I will say, however, that it’s a little bit disappointing not to see touch screen support here. It’s not strictly needed, but it would’ve been nice to have the option available when the touch screen is right there in handheld mode, just waiting to be used. 

The environmental puzzles are not quite as good, with many of them being needlessly obtuse to the point of frustration. To be perfectly candid, I would not have finished this game had I not had access to a guide. Help with these puzzles can sometimes be found within the game’s dialogue, but it swings wildly from explaining the puzzle’s solution in fine detail to a vague, barely-useful hint, with very little on the scale in between. If you decide Chaos on Deponia is the game for you, don’t feel bad looking up a guide for it — often, the solution is not worth the hours of mindless wandering and trial and error. 

In terms of performance, there’s little to write home about on the Switch port. Loading times are a touch on the long side, but it performs mostly fine, with the exception of a few small hitches here and there, and one or two unfortunate crashes. Thankfully there’s a pretty aggressive auto-save feature, so you’re unlikely to have to replay more than a conversation if that does happen, but I would be remiss not to mention it nonetheless. 

Chaos On Deponia is one of those strange games that technically has little wrong with it, but just feels wrong to play. Mechanically, it’s one of the better adaptations of the point-and-click genre, and it has all the hallmarks of what makes such a game great, but in terms of its characters and story, there’s little to keep anybody interested, and plenty to drive a person away. My advice? If you’ve played the first one and loved it, you’ll probably love this one too. Otherwise, you might be better giving the series a miss.

Review code provided by Daedalic Entertainment