Filip Novotny Nowadays, classic point-and-click adventure games are not very popular anymore. However, the German Deadelic Entertainment obviously does not follow game trends and releases one "old school" adventure game after another. Their latest effort, Deponia, is in some ways reminiscent of the complete classic presented by the Monkey Island series.
The plot of this cartoon adventure is set in a special universe, which is divided into two diametrically different worlds. On the one hand, we have Elysium, a modern civilized planet inhabited by many young, beautiful and intelligent people. On the other hand, or far below Elysium, there is Deponia. It is a disgusting and smelly garbage dump inhabited by various strange characters who have not exactly lost their minds twice. They live their simple lives and only look up with a sigh at the paradise that those up in Elysium probably experience. Here, someone may be offered a comparison with the Czech reality, but we do not share such a view of the world, so we will not politicize and will rather move on to illuminating the story.
Its narrator will be the young man Rufus living in the dirty and smelly Deponia. Although he is the target of ridicule from the entire village and especially the hatred of his ex-girlfriend Toni due to his talkativeness and clumsiness, he looks at others with a positive outlook and his only goal is to escape to Elysium as soon as possible. And so he tries in every possible way to construct a means that would get him out of that run-down dump. However, because he is an unimaginable neshika and budižkniče, he managed to screw up another of his attempts to escape. Instead of Elysium, he lands on a special airship, where he witnesses a very important dialogue for Deponia.
The representatives of Elysium sent this very ship with the aim of investigating whether there is life in the uninviting wasteland below them. If not, Deponia will be destroyed. And now the main antagonist comes into play, not unlike Rufus Cletus, who plans to lie to his rulers about the existence of life on Deponia and thus doom it to extinction. To make matters worse, the clumsy Rufus managed to take the beautiful Goal with him when he fell from the ship, with whom he immediately falls in love. Our main character thus receives a number of other tasks within a minute, to which he must exert all his strength. He must bring Goal out of a coma she fell into after a nasty fall, deal with the evil Cletus and hordes of Elysian police gorillas, and last but not least, decide whether to let her hated Deponia lie in ashes.
So the screenwriters have prepared for us a really crazy, but high-quality story, which simply grabs Deponia and won't let go. The game always clearly sets a certain task for us, thanks to which it constantly drives us forward. Yes, it's still a matter of combining items in a point-and-click adventure game, but most of the time it's not aimless, frantic clicking. Although sometimes we will combine apparently uncombinable objects (we will use about twenty of them to make an espresso to wake up the incapacitated Goal), but in the end everything fits together and makes sense. In addition, Rufus or the other characters will give us a clue from time to time with dialogue so that we can push on. And if the cursed "sour" ever occurs, it is usually the result of insufficient exploration of game locations.
The objects that can be interacted with, thanks to the beautiful cartoon processing, fit perfectly into the environment, so it is easy to overlook some important little thing. Fortunately, we have a special tool at our disposal: after pressing the spacebar, all important objects and transitions between locations are highlighted, so it is impossible to miss anything. Unfortunately, the developers did not mention this option anywhere.
In addition to the already mentioned story, the screenwriters also worked with the dialogues (and monologues) of the characters. The absurdity of the environment that Deponia envisions is perfectly underlined by the comical characters of its inhabitants. By chance, on such an ordinary way towards the town hall, we come across Rufus' slimy and subversive "friend" Wenzel, a pink mutating transvestite, and finally the senile mayor, who is sleeping under the table in his office. All of these share a certain antipathy towards Rufs, and his attempts to escape are a source of amusement and ridicule. So for such an outsider, the task of saving the entire Landfill will be extremely difficult, and to get others to help him, he will need a lot of unorthodox (and thus fun for us) persuasion techniques.
If you want to go back to the days of Monkey Island and want to see the world through the eyes of good old cartoon adventure games for a while, Deponia is worth checking out. It brings a lot of great fun and funny ideas, moreover, in a pleasant processing and with high-quality sound. The only minus for some may be the rather strange ending of the initially promising story, even if pointing out a possible continuation (THE END...?) excuses the authors. So up to the dump and let's have a second part!
[button color=red link=http://store.steampowered.com/app/214340/ target=”“]Deponia - €19,99[/button]
