A Fond Farewell With Goodbye Deponia

You don’t need to have played the previous two games in this trilogy in order to enjoy Daedalic Entertainment’s latest point and click adventure. Granted, Goodbye Deponia is somewhat terminal as titles go but this cartoon-styled, humour-packed game is entirely self contained and does a good job of catching up inexperienced players with events of the narrative’s past.

I know this because I hadn’t seen anything of the previous two games before starting this third instalment for preview. The early portion is packed with little references which, to seasoned visitors to Deponia, would be throwaway comments that merely evoke a fleeting memory. To those of us visiting for the first time, they build to fill in a fairly complete picture of prior events. It’s a minor thing, something that might easily go unnoticed, but it’s so well done because it was obviously so well planned out before it was implemented.

That’s Goodbye Deponia’s greatest strength, as you might expect. The way it ties things together, linking all of the situations that comprise a kind of landscaped puzzle into a cohesive unit, is so clever. That’s the trademark of a good point-and-click adventure, of course: to naturally encourage your engagement in the world it has built without ever feeling like the puzzles are unnecessarily getting in the way of exploring the narrative.

In terms of mechanics and systems, it’s your traditional fare. You collect items around the various screens you can explore and then you use them on other items – either in the landscape or in your inventory – to solve problems and move on with the story.

The puzzles start simply enough, with limited scope for combinations of items or things to use them on in the scenery. It’s not long, however, before you’re stuck into multi-layered puzzles that require some doubling back on yourself, plenty of exploration of each scene, and some creative thought in how you might put those items to effective use. It’s frustrating to be stuck but it never feels too cheap – the solutions are always logical enough, given the proper degree of thought and with all the required items at your disposal.

There are occasional mini-games included as part of the puzzle-solving process. They might take the form of logical switching puzzles or gesture-based mini-games and there was one in particular – on a kind of underlit dancefloor, bizarrely – that was probably the most complex thing I’ve had to think about since I left school but it worked, once I got my head around the concept in play. They’re welcome distractions to the eye-squinting exploration or grander puzzling but they don’t disrupt things too much so they’re never out of place – at least in this section of the game.

We won’t discuss the narrative here, so as to avoid spoilers, but rest assured that what I played – around 3-4 hours – was well written, with plenty of twists and turns and some quite complex situational plotting used to comic effect.

The dialogue suffers occasionally when it reaches too far to try to be funny but perhaps that’s simply a case of something being lost in translation from the original German. Either way, one particular joke about a female character’s mood and menstrual cycle was slightly uncomfortable, even though it was fleeting, and there were a couple of more base jokes that belie the sophistication of the systems in the game.

Forgive that slight immaturity (or even revel in it), and you’re left with what appears to be a well constructed set of puzzles, with an interesting story and a great hand-drawn cartoon style.

Visually, it’s a kind of cross between steampunk animé and an episode of The Simpsons. That’s no bad thing, of course, and the little flourishes of animation here and there, though relatively sparse, are a nice touch and occasional cause of amusement.

So, with a pleasing art style, smart systems and a selection of puzzles that range from simple to hair-tuggingly difficult, Goodbye Deponia is a great example of a modern point-and-click adventure that just might want to iron out a few little wrinkles before it’s released on Steam come October 17th.