Chaos On Deponia – The Verdict

Chaos On Deponia – The Verdict

Chaos On Deponia is the second part of Daedalic Entertainments point and click adventure trilogy. It sees the return of Rufus as he attempts yet again, to make his way to Elysium and stop the Argonons from destroying the junk planet of Deponia. The problem is that Rufus is a magnet for pandemonium and makes his task infinitely harder by simply being himself. A handy intro video sums up all the goings on of the first game for anyone who didn’t play it and as a reminder for all who did.

It starts off in a way that the first game didn’t, with a bang. There’s no feel of slowly accessing the story or being drip fed the puzzle mechanics. You start off your first puzzle with a scene of pure hilarity and destruction in the kitchen of Doc and his wife. This sets the tone of disorder and brilliantly witty humour perfectly and gives a hint of what’s to come in relation to the improvements that have made in this second outing. In fact it seems as if the developers have listened to what fans were disliking about the first game and have improved upon this where they can. The overall feel is that the game depth has increased not just in length but in the size of the world and its characters.

At some stages the puzzles are a lot more complex, becoming chains in which one is needed to solve the next and the next. These situations tend to hold a lot of witty humour and are under even crazier than before circumstances. This can however, lead to one problem that the first game had which was the illogical feel of some of the puzzles. A couple of times after exhausting all the logical possibilities I was left randomly trying to fit items together or use them in situations that made no sense, just so I could complete a puzzle. In saying that the crazy situations never feel out of place in a world where crazy things happening is somewhat the norm. They are very inventive, clever and fit in well to the overall story of the game.

Chaos On Deponia is filled with little highlights of humour that make the game all the more worth playing. The between chapters song is always a delight and some of the puzzling situations are hilarious even just to look at. Some of the jokes tie into storyline events that took place in the first game but these pop up rarely and thanks to the intro video its not essential to have played it beforehand.

Clocking in at around twelve hours, this is a fair bit longer than the first game and this time has been put to good use for the most part. Chaos On Deponia is charming, has some great puzzles, a unique and attractive art style and the same witty humour as the first game. More time has also been put into developing the main characters and having more minor characters to fill the world with. The game does drag a little in the middle, but after such a strong start it was inevitable that the pace and excitement of the story would have to slow down at some stage.

As a middle game, Chaos On Deponia has surprising length but has left some vital questions still unanswered, hopefully these will become clear in the third and final part. Comically this is a brilliant game, where torpedo dolphins and platypus catapults are the norm and puzzles are a delight to solve.

Verdict – Head shot

Platforms Available – PC, Mac
Platform Reviewed – PC

Steam review copy supplied by Daedalic Entertainment

Please check this post for more on our scoring policy.

Comments are closed.