Deponia 3: Goodbye Deponia

Daedalic's Deponia series must be, without a doubt, one of the finest adventure game series ever created. With its gorgeous cartoon graphics, terrific localization, amazing characters, its gripping, epic farce of a narrative and puzzles that are logical *and* beautiful in their glorious stupidity, it has won over point-and-click adventure fanatics 'round the globe (including, quite obviously, the writer of this review). Thank the gods that Goodbye Deponia does nothing to detract from this golden reputation! The ending left me a little sad at first, but it is fitting in its way -- and more than a little open-ended. While the designer, Poki, has mentioned that he will never return to the Rufus and Goal saga, he has stated that he would like to explore other aspects of Deponian/Elysian existence someday; I can only hope that after his next few projects (which are sure to be excellent) he will consider revisiting this captivating world. Do not play this game until you have played the others! They are all more than worth GOG's price. (A side note: The Deponia series, particularly this installment, has received a great deal of criticism from the hypersensitive set for its "offensive" themes. Rest assured: the content of these games isn't nearly half as salty as an average episode of Family Guy or South Park.)

Deponia series started with a highly intriguing, though slightly too "adventure logic" first part about (mis)adventures of Rufus - headstrong and foolish egoistic "hero", who constantly creates accident around himself bringing misfortune to others and injuries upon himself. Second game in the series, while having a kind of a redundant plot which "wouldn't have happened if Rufus wasn't an idiot" by the end justifies itself in plot and is an amazingly fun adventure game in everything else. The third game, unfortunately, instead of moving the story and the character development further from where they were at the last game, mostly tries to repeat itself with new backgrounds. Even more, it turns Rufus from a likable fool into an unpleasant character to play as and manages to do that after the point of the story where he definitely was supposed to redeem himself. There's rather gross humour here, lots of questionable jokes. Story explanations are, while welcome, often rushed and underwhelming. There is still some charm of the previous games left, of course. The music is still good, although the majority, if not all, is reused. The art still looks good. And some of the secondary characters are genuinely fun, old or new. Gameplay-wise it feels less refined than the predecessor, but still not as "guess what dev's thought" as the first entry of the series. Not a bad game. But rather disappointing and not nearly as fun as it could and should have been.

The last in the series is probably one of the funniest graphic adventures out there. If you games with a big heart wrapped in irreverent humour, you should try this series. The puzzles are great, the voice acting is stellar and the story has more depth than you would have initially guessed. Still, even though the ending is satisfying if you are thinking character development-wise, the ending does leave one too many loose ends hangings and even though I think the creators don't have the intention of continuing the Deponia saga, I think they should reconsider in one last hurray.

I played deponia 1 - 3 because there was a lot of buzz around it and I am a huge point and click adventure fan. I have played the DOS/Amiga classics and a big selection of the ones that followed until today. The humour was appealing to me in the first part, but the main character really doesn't redeem himself as an anti-hero, he just gets more unbearable from part 1 through to 3. At first he seems like a clumsy, selfish bozo in the sense that simon the sorcerer was. Really a jerk, but so ridiculous at the same time that it was fun to witness his transgressions and the following instant karma. Over time he just became more and more of a jerk that it just wasn't funny anymore. Also I have encountered a number of game breaking bugs, that were reported years ago by numerous people online. The V-Sync problems for example, which make the inventory annoying to use and some puzzles impossible (the gopher one...). This bug was consistent with all three parts of the game and changing my monitor refresh rate to 60hz didn't fix it, like many suggested online. Some scenes also got weirdly stuck, like the organon scene, right after I fired the cannon and the rebels fired back. The game entered a loop, but I simply reloaded. The ending also was quite a let down, I was somehow expecting a bit more and it felt a little cheap (see my points regarding character redemption). Not sure if I will also play the fourth title in the series, it seems like many people thought the ending wasn't satisfying so they made a sequel to rectify that and also cash in one more time.