- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
The point and click adventure is Linux native, released in 2012
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There are a bunch of jokes in this game that I absolutely am not okay with.
Yeah, the whole point of the game is the main character being a horrible asshole.
But then, the game for example makes jokes about a black woman ending up a slave. She ends up as a slave not because the main character is being thoughtless. Yes, his actions affect the result, but it’s a pure coincidence he could not have reasonably predicted. The joke boils down to “look, we dare to be this inappropriate.”
Some of similar jokes could maybe read as commentary on horrible bigots who really do behave towards other people in the way the protagonist of this game does, because technically the bad things happen to those people because of the protagonist’s behaviour. But when the same things sometimes happen to them kind of “just like that”, it puts the rest of the jokes in a very different context: The developers of the game actually are making fun of the fact that black people were used as slaves or that women often experience sexual violence.
And then there’s also the transsexual who turns out to be the worst stereotype of a transsexual that a MAGA person ever could imagine. And, and, and.
Some of the jokes are kind of more neutral: At one point the protagonist needs to feed some ten-ish children to a monster, camouflaging them as hot dogs and covering them in ketchup and mustard. And then the children do indeed get eaten and the game progresses. I mean, okay, it’s super inappropriate in a way, but it’s not perpetuating hate speech. But a surprisingly large share of the jokes are punching at various minorities.
I’ve never seen as much bigotry in a game as I saw in the Deponia trilogy when I played through it.
Snowflake
Wait till you play the fourth part, it’s the best by far.
But I don’t know about any woman ending up as a slave tbh? There was one that ended up dacing for money, for reasons completely out of her control. You can read bigotry into this as much as you could social commentary. That’s not even a longshot imo
It’s been years since I played through these games, and I have forgotten much, but “has to dance for money” is not the whole story.
It’s more like “has to dance for money, has to always give all income to another person and is physically not able to leave before having saved up a large sum of money to pay the debt”, or something along those lines. And the reasons were out of her control, but very crucially, also out of the control of the protagonist.
I find it refreshing to get to play the bad guy in a game. He’s doing things I absolutely would never do, and it is me who has to click the button to command him to do those atrocities. It’s good because you should know your enemy, and this gives me a perspective that let’s me peek into the thinking of an absolute fucking asshole. Also, if you ever find any similarities between what you’d do and what the protagonist does, you know that’s something you need to process in yourself.
But… There are so many spots where the horrible things happen to the people in the game for reasons not in control of the protagonist. So, you should probably re-read previous paragraph, adding a lot of “would” words in there. Because when it’s not about the protagonist being evil, it’s about the developers being mean. You’re not role-playing an asshole, you’re playing a game that is an asshole towards various minorities.
Of course: I did play the game in German. Others are saying many of the jokes get missed if you play it in English. Maybe the game is kind of milder if played in English, then? Maybe it’s left more ambiguous whether the people in the game will really live a miserable life for the rest of their days?
The damsel in distress trope is real here, too, which by itself is already dumb, but the woman is split up into three individuals that each reflect one piece of her personality, which turn out to be an asshole, an infant and another asshole.
Also, her name is literally “Goal”.
Like… Who the hell wrote this?
I love their games. I already own Deponia and some others. But I still didn’t own some of the other games. So I bought the whole pack for 5€ 🤩 Thanks for sharing!
I tried playing the first one, but the boomer humor was really bad.
Combined with the ole inflatable duck to recover keys type problem solving, it’s slop
But it’s human slop, as AI tools weren’t usable at that time.
why does it look like Penny arcade the video game
I’m still soo torn on Deponia.
The artwork is gorgeous. But the writing is… Odd. And the protagonist is just so damn unlikeable.
/edit I mean, definitely grab it, especially if it’s free. It’s worth a few bucks, so for nothing it’s definitely worth the click.
I think it was translated from German and I have no idea how well that worked out. I feel like many jokes are really tied to the language, and they also had banger voice actors for the German edition.
Generally I think the series gets better with every game, which is kinda the opposite you would expect these days. The first was kinda short, rather tame, not great not terrible… The fourth is probably one of the longest Point&Clicks in history and completely unhinged.
