Deponia Doomsday - Review
After the bummer ending of Goodbye Deponia, the follow up game asks what if it could be changed. After a glimpse into the future where Elysium has fallen and monsters called Fewlocks cover the land, an old grizzled Rufus detonates the bombs that blow apart Deponia. An earlier version of Rufus wakes up, and everything that has happened across the last 3 games were in his dream. What follows is a time travelling adventure, as Rufus does what he does best and messes everything up around him. Whether intentional or entirely accidental, prepare to mess with time and space and generally be a dick to those around you. While Rufus learnt some things about himself at the conclusion of the Deponia trilogy it doesn’t seem to matter here, he’s still unrelentingly Rufus.
This puts this game in a tricky spot, it struggles to justify its existence after the series ended by addressing the way Goodbye Deponia ended. It tries to double down in a way that leaves the ending in a strange place, overall like with the ending of Goodbye Deponia it gets weirdly serious for a game based around the ridiculous.
While puzzles in Goodbye Deponia ranged from good to the nonsensical, Doomsday too often gets caught up in the more out there puzzles. Like the game before, each area feels like you’ve been chucked in the deep end. There are too many different things to handle without a clear path to take. In Doomsday the solutions hit a new level of obtuseness, often there is no clear objective and the majority of the solutions make no sense in the logic. Even for a point and click game it’s really stretching, made worse by time sensitive puzzles. There will be occasions where you have a limited time to act and if you don't, you're going to have to do it all over again. Until you work out what you need to do you’re stuck, a guide is nearly necessary to play with this game.
Almost straight off the bat Doomsday lowers the comedy bar with a transphobic joke, actually one of several as Rufus also mocks the character in question. It’s a recurring character throughout the series, having limited memory of the first game I had forgotten this was an ongoing joke through the series. The racism isn’t as overt this time around, but there is still plenty of sexism and a really off joke in regards to disability. If any of these kinds of jokes are unpleasant to you then it is hard to recommend this game (or Goodbye Deponia for that matter). I know this is just a port of a game from a few years ago, but this series in its entirety came out in the 2010s. It’s not about having to be politically correct, it’s about being better and not punching down. It’s made clear that Rufus is not a good person, but it doesn’t ever explain why others also make these bad jokes. The way the humour is baked into the story and puzzles I’m not sold that it’s some kind of error in translation.
The game crashed more than once. In fact it crashed 7 times across my play through, often at the end of a sequence. It’s lucky the auto save is so often that I only usually lost about 5 minutes worth of work. Not to say it’s still not annoying, it’s a pain in the ass to have to wait to get back into the game. It shouldn’t happen and hopefully they patch it.
What to say about the Deponia games? I wish I could say I enjoyed them more than I did, it always came across as a fun point and click adventure game. Unfortunately the main trilogy feels like one game just cut into three parts instead of three full games. The puzzles get more nonsensical the further you go, and they drag on more often than not. While it looks nice and Rufus is at least well cast, everything that comes out of his mouth brings it all back down again with some truly awful ‘humour’. If you’re stuck for a point and click adventure game then these games can scratch that itch, but for many out there it’s just not worth it.
Review code provided by Daedalic Entertainment
