Adventure Gamers - Forums

There is an important distinction between games that are inadvertently absurd, and games that revel in it. And deponia is obviously the later. I enjoy it greatly

UruBoo - 04 March 2016 09:58 AM

I tent to agree in some parts with the review on RPS. The Deponia series is trully one of the games that have the most absurd puzzles in history. No logic, no sense, inimaginable puzzles. I know this is part of the way the games are intent to be. But I don’t like them. And the humor and jokes are also not very funny in most cases, to my taste. But I will play the game because I’m an adventure gamer and play every single game out there, doesn’t matter if it’s awfull or awesome.

That is a LOT of games. Are you sure you’ve exhausted all 6241 adventure games (according to MobyGames as of today) before you play one you know you won’t like?

More racism!

Let me sum up my personal feelings first. Danganronpa was nauseatingly tedious but still I sort of wanted to see what would happen next. Playing Deponia 4 I just wanted to finish it and uninstall. Also, Danganronpa had exactly one funny moment (Give me all your donuts!), Deponia 4 has zero.

But really I just wanted to make a couple of incidental observations. It was interesting to see a couple of places in Deponia 4 where it goes for a kind of a cinematic sequence, where the actions are directly related to the story and to the events happening in the game world, plus you can see the actions and the outcome in all details (and it takes lots and lots of effort to do that with 2D animation; also, it shows that those sequences do not have to be quick-time events with nothing more than mashing a single button). Deponia 3 had something similar going for about one or two opening screens. Deponia 4 lasts longer, but then it also reverts to ‘traditional’ completely irrelevant inventory puzzles.

The Deponia series in general comes across as being very uneven in its graphic design. If anyone remembers Captain Morgane, that game had an amazing number of animations for pretty much every small action in the game. Deponia often has a couple of frames of an extend hand/move back hand animation, which looks really appalling in such a visually rich game. Also, some sprites seem too simplistic and don’t fit well into the detailed backgrounds. Plus, backgrounds mostly adhere to a consistent style, but once in a while you get something that seems to have leaked in by accident from Memoria.

Also, it’s surprising how they ignore the most basic AG guidelines, like avoiding the repetitions of lengthy pieces of text. Look at an item, you get a few lines of text. Try to use that item on something, you get those same lines of text. Try to use that item on something else, that’s right, you get those same lines of text again. Someone has not been attending Adventure Game Design 101.

lancelot - 05 March 2016 07:30 AM

Let me sum up my personal feelings first. Danganronpa was nauseatingly tedious but still I sort of wanted to see what would happen next. Playing Deponia 4 I just wanted to finish it and uninstall. Also, Danganronpa had exactly one funny moment (Give me all your donuts!), Deponia 4 has zero.

But really I just wanted to make a couple of incidental observations. It was interesting to see a couple of places in Deponia 4 where it goes for a kind of a cinematic sequence, where the actions are directly related to the story and to the events happening in the game world, plus you can see the actions and the outcome in all details (and it takes lots and lots of effort to do that with 2D animation; also, it shows that those sequences do not have to be quick-time events with nothing more than mashing a single button). Deponia 3 had something similar going for about one or two opening screens. Deponia 4 lasts longer, but then it also reverts to ‘traditional’ completely irrelevant inventory puzzles.

The Deponia series in general comes across as being very uneven in its graphic design. If anyone remembers Captain Morgane, that game had an amazing number of animations for pretty much every small action in the game. Deponia often has a couple of frames of an extend hand/move back hand animation, which looks really appalling in such a visually rich game. Also, some sprites seem too simplistic and don’t fit well into the detailed backgrounds. Plus, backgrounds mostly adhere to a consistent style, but once in a while you get something that seems to have leaked in by accident from Memoria.

Also, it’s surprising how they ignore the most basic AG guidelines, like avoiding the repetitions of lengthy pieces of text. Look at an item, you get a few lines of text. Try to use that item on something, you get those same lines of text. Try to use that item on something else, that’s right, you get those same lines of text again. Someone has not been attending Adventure Game Design 101.

Good analysis. I’m glad someone around here has taken off their rose-tinted glasses when it comes to discussing Daedelic.

It has been obvious for a while that with its huge amount of filler Deponia is intended to be their cash cow. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see 5 and 6 released within the next year or so.

I enjoy adventure game puzzles. I don’t care if they’re irrelevant or inventory-heavy - as long as they’re clever yet comprehensible, I’m happy.
I also enjoy large (but interaction-filled!) areas in adventure games.

Meanwhile, I don’t care for QTEs and have limited patience for games that are nothing but, especially if they have no real exploration. (new telltales, etc.)
(I liked the twist Deponia Doomsday added to some of its QTEs, though)

That’s why I’m absolutely happy with the Deponia series - great puzzles and interesting locations.
I did feel Doomsday’s was a bit weaker than the others, though.

Deponia’s story & humor are good (not great), but that’s secondary in an adventure game in my opinion - gameplay’s first.

(Plus, I don’t think I ever played a point&click; adventure game where I could say without reservation that the story or humor were great, and I did play most of them).

Theres many great 4th wall breaking zings in this one, such as:“platypuses only eat stale bread, they spit out anything thats fresh, and then they complain everything was better back in the day and write embittered online reviews”

Karlok - 06 March 2016 08:26 PM

zane - 06 March 2016 07:22 PM

Theres many great 4th wall breaking zings in this one, such as:“platypuses only eat stale bread, they spit out anything thats fresh, and then they complain everything was better back in the day and write embittered online reviews”

I hope John Walker got that far in the game. He wrote in his review that he didn’t finish it.

hah yeah i wont be reading his review until after i finish the game, and i might still not read it after that. He doesnt like the humor style, or the puzzle style, so its a foregone conclusion
Iv enjoyed the puzzles quite a bit. Initially i thought this concept might get aggravating with the time looping and resetting and having to do puzzle elements over. But ultimately time only resets or loops when im ready for it to, so its not bad at all. I havnt been frustrated enough to want to use a walkthrough. Only one puzzle has pushed the absurdity limits so far: the pulling the star from the sky.. i was lucky to bump into that through clicking.
Another great moment: hobo moses with his 3 commandments, the third being thou shalt not do more than 3 commandments, unless of course the producer reminds you not to write anything in stone

Karlok - 07 March 2016 05:38 AM

zane - 06 March 2016 09:11 PM

John Walker also complained about the lack of time travel gags. I have no doubt he will “feel sorry” for me and my sense of humor (is it my imagination or are more and more reviewers insulting both developers and players?), but I’ve arrived at Paradox City and am enjoying it a lot.

To be fair, he did complain at the lack of “clever” time travel gags and fun uses of the mechanic rather than just not enough jokes. I don’t always agree with Walker (he’s entirely wrong in his blanket hatred of Myst games, for instance) but he’s generally pretty good at conveying why he likes or doesn’t like something, which is the most important thing in a review. And he did provide probably my favourite description of a badly designed adventure:

A big part of this is due to the puzzle structure. There are two types present. The one where you’ve got a key, and a keyhole, and the puzzle is to figure out which to put into which. And then there’s the ones where you’re supposed to know that if you use the knife on the clock you’ll remove the hands which can of course be used to pick the lock on a wardrobe.