Poor Janosch - the best part of Chaos on Deponia - reduced to a two-bit cameo. But to rob them of all their presence and purpose? A crippling choice in an otherwise grand finale. The previous episode cobbled together an amazingly capable task force of a cast. Goodbye Deponia’s biggest folly is the aversion to its past. But for every thirty dozen lines of dialogue Rufus gets to himself, equally revered characters like would-be-up-and-comer Janosch or wasteland vets like the Doc have to fight piecemeal over one. It’s why I adore him, deplorable as he is. No one trumps the moral derision Rufus can dish. The bummer, then, is that the narrative is all Rufus all the time, and never manages to kick the habit.
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And because this origin story unfolds in real time, amidst the contexts of the Deponian war, the consequences are far-reaching and help etch the series with a more personal relevance for Rufus. The bulk of his arc is fantastic and long-awaited, a funny, chromosomal history of the man of mayhem that was never necessary, but is totally appreciated. So what gives?įor better or for worse, Goodbye Deponia eschews much of its world-building laurels in favor of a deeper, more resonant look at Rufus. I ran French fries through an assembly line, and in turn, built God. I sloshed through underground forests of pipe trunks and gasket canopies. While Goodbye Deponia still takes place on the titular planet, inhabited by all flavors of hobos and heroes, the world as a character doesn’t feel as pulpy and endearing as it did in games past.
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The end result posits Deponia as a dumpster of random ideas full of chimeral sewer beasts, bearded babies, and characters you love, hate, and until now, know nothing about. Daedalic has taken those cloning conceits by the throat and stretched them into what is easily their most nonsensical game to date, letting the world’s junkyard mentality extrapolate the what-ifs in fun, meaningful ways. While the opening hours are of unfortunate inconsequence to the rest of the story, the latter half of the game spins some wickedly inventive narrative that fertilizes itself in the multi-Goal schizophrenia we saw in the preceding episode. Goodbye Deponia is a slow, slow burn that doesn’t start coasting until those Hotel Menetekel moments are finally up and done with. And, of course, he’ll succeed, but not without leaving a landfill of broken bones and platypus parts in his wake.
During their stay, the appearance of Cletus kicks off an episode of who’s-who switcheroo straight out of an 80s family sitcom as Rufus attempts to impersonate his rival and sneak aboard a Fisco-bound battle cruiser, nasally snark and all. On their return voyage to Porta Fisco, the resistance fighters are left stranded upon an Organon supply route until they stumble onto the Hotel Menetekel, a precarious lodging buoyed like a rusty beehive beneath the high-rise tracks. The game begins clumsily where the last left off, with Rufus once again compromising the group’s efforts against Cletus and the Organon. “Deponia” only in name, Daedalic’s final chapter to this irreverent, scrappy series lays the Rufus on thick, making for a mostly satisfying climax that doesn’t always let its fascinating world shout louder than the rowdy protagonist. It claws for that character arc so much so that it seems to forget what made these Rufian romps so cherished to begin with. Goodbye Deponia works hard to earn its closure. For all his endemic wrongdoings, for all the animals tortured in chemicals and circumstance, for all his egotism and vanity and high-horsing, his disrespect for human life, caution tape, and flammable objects, Rufus closes out the trilogy a changed man. In its final, crumbling moments, Goodbye Deponia pulls a fast one: Rufus finally learns something.
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