The third and final game in the Deponia adventure game series.
Spoilers within.
In the first two Deponia games we met Rufus, a slightly twisted and mischievous fellow who wants to run away from home. There are running gags about how he has set fire to the city, destroyed property, and generally caused all kinds of havoc. Those two games were fun.
Goodbye Deponia looked to be a fun game as well, but Rufus takes a much darker turn here. Rufus usually gets people to do things they shouldn’t do and like all characters in adventure games, steals everything he can pick up. Playing an adventure game puts you in the position of playing the hero of the game. In great adventure games, you usually play a good person. A detective solving a crime, someone searching for answers to mysteries, a person with a moral code of some kind who may kill countless people along the way, but is essentially a good person.
Rufus is pure and simple evil. Not that it’s his fault, he can only do what he is written to do.
Unlike more open ended adventure games, you have to do what the game designers want you to do here. Among the things our ‘hero’ is required to do:get his ex-girlfriend a rope to commit suicide with, turn baby dolphins into cat food, murder a Gondolier, sell one of the only black character in the story into slavery as a dancing monkey, sell her boyfriend to an alien life form that uses him as a host, murder a number of small children after trying to sell them to a pedophile, make poisoned sandwiches out of urine cakes to feed to others, poison a baby and make it throw up on it’s older brother’s face, force a homeless man to eat a shoe, cause the destruction of a floating city, destroy his friend’s barge, and split his girlfriend into three separate personalities.
On top of all that, the story ends with the death of our vile and evil hero, but it isn’t a good ending because the game never acknowledges that Rufus is bad. They even go so far as to pretend that his death was an act of heroism. He dies and leaves his girlfriend in the hands of the story’s principle villain!
Many of the puzzles were confusing and pointless, besides being offensive, sexist, racist, and hateful. The sad bit is that it was a great looking game and there was clearly a lot of work put into the vast world and countless characters that suffer by living there. The first two games were pretty great, maybe there was just no way the last one could live up to the others.
But there was so much wrong with Goodbye Deponia.
