Hello, Goodbye Deponia - Preview
by Alex St-Amour , posted on 16 June 2013 / 3,177 Views
From walking around the E3 show floor it is clear that there are a ton of great game franchises that I have never given a chance, either from simple lack of time or ignorant lack of awareness. I righted one of those wrongs when I was introduced the Goodbye Deponia by Daedalic Entertainment, the third game in the series and the one that I believe will finally get me back into adventure games as a whole.
For those not in the know, Deponia is a series of traditional point and click adventure games starring the oft-unlucky Rufus whose ultimate goal is to escape his life in the slums of Deponia and head to the rich floating city of Elysium along with his love interest, Goal. To accomplish these missions Rufus has resorted to cloning not only himself but Goal as well, resulting in some pretty unique experiences where you can switch between multiple copies of yourself to solve a puzzle. The developers are aiming for roughly 20 hours of gameplay - an extremely good length for a game of this genre.
Artistically, Goodbye Deponia is a very well put together game. It features frame by frame animations and hand drawn visuals, making it look like a comic book come to life. The writing and setting is also very colorful and hilarious too, with the game feeling more like a grown-up Saturday morning cartoon than a point and click adventure game, as evident by the developer’s penchant for bearded babies throughout. The final game will also include full voice acting with some of the original actors returning to their rolls as well as feature translations into many different languages.
All in all I was extremely impressed with Goodbye Deponia. I left the meeting wanting to take the game with me and dive straight into this rich and colorful world. Thankfully I won’t have to wait much longer as it will be releasing this October for both PC and Mac (App Store). And there’s more good news as the developers haven’t announced but are planning on releasing a compilation of all three titles down the road at some point, so maybe I will finally be able to experience the Deponia saga properly one day.
