This post includes puzzle spoilers for both The Secret of Monkey Island and Deponia
I don’t like to keep harping on a bad game, but my mind keeps going back to Deponia. Deponia is very obviously influenced by The Secret of Monkey Island. Both games follow hapless rogues on a humorous adventure to get the girl, and there are also similarities in tone, timing, and structure. However, those same similarities that remind us of the other game cause Deponia to collapse in on itself. It doesn’t live up to Monkey Island’s standards, and, of course, it doesn’t have to. However, it fails to meet the standards that it sets for itself. In trying to be like Monkey Island, it only makes the ways in which it is not that much more obvious.
In fact, the experience of playing Deponia is so close to that of playing Monkey Island that I second guessed my own evaluation of the latter game, a game that I first played not too long ago (I was a Sierra kid.). I feared that maybe The Secret of Monkey Island was a classic by virtue of the era in which it was released and that the game didn’t hold up that well to a modern eye. In going back to check, I found, though, that no, it still holds up amazingly well. In fact, looking at the game through modern critical eyes reveals how surprisingly modern the sensibilities of that game are. It was so far ahead of its time in some respects that I doubt many, if any, could have realized that it was ahead of its time rather than just the next step forward.
Structurally The Secret of Monkey Island is a standard hero’s journey adventure. The hero faces three trials to prove his worth, goes away, faces evil, comes back victorious, and is the better for it. Throughout the journey, the characters and the game itself are cracking jokes left and right. However, in the details of LucasArts’s game is a highly subversive satirical take on that subject. Completing the three trials don’t make you special or uniquely qualified for being a hero because they are repeatable tasks, with one even asking you to reset the challenge for the next guy. The tribe of tropical cannibals has gone on a vegetarian diet. Your quest to rescue the damsel in distress is — in the end — a waste of time because she has already rescued herself. These examples may seem like simple trope subversion, but the game puts them to work through the development of a combination of likable, thinking characters that end up making a commentary on society’s views on gender roles and how storytelling reinforces those views. Games can barely aim for such an ideal nowadays.
Deponia, by contrast, falls into the prime time network sit-com television style of comedy. Rufus is the idiot who has to try and please the girl and things end up working out for him despite how abhorrent he has been as a person up to this point. It isn’t even the type of lack of intelligence that creates abnormal situations to create comedy. Rufus’s idiocy is actively destructive towards everyone around him, and the game tries to balance out the scales by injuring him as a comeuppance. It isn’t funny. It’s an example of a hack following a formula concerning what’s funny. There’s no subversion of expectations, only a slavish adherence to behavior that is more repulsive than anything else.
Guybrush Threepwood is naïve and maybe out of his depth, but he isn’t incompetent. He has a desire to push forward in the face of any odds, including ludicrous ones. Is his behavior stupid given the danger that he has to put himself through? Yes, but it is commendable stupidity. He understands the dangers and the odds and is willing to take the risk. He is an everyman willing to go the distance. The player can get behind this character; they root for him and laugh at his follies. Deponia‘s Rufus on the other hand has few, if any, positive attributes. Seeing such a cad like him get injured for his asinine behavior isn’t funny. It is expected and among the more vengeful, something hoped for. He has no-one to blame for his pain but himself, and that isn’t funny. It is when the pain and damage come despite his best efforts that the game is funny, and even then, it walks the line between being plausible and simple “seeing it coming.”
There is no better comparison to make at this point than through a single puzzle from each game. What I have described thus far may make Deponia sound like a vague retread of the LucasArts stable of games, rather than specifically The Secret of Monkey Island. However, these similar puzzles show how closely Deponia sticks to the formula while missing the point behind it. If I were being ungenerous, I’d say one puzzle was lifted nearly wholesale from one game to the other before disguising it.
In The Secret of Monkey Island, after you complete the aforementioned three trails, you are thrown into the bay while tied to an idol and left to drown. Luckily, Guybrush Threepwood can hold his breath for 10 minutes. He says so when talking to the pirate captains. That is how much time you have to solve the puzzle and get back onto the dock.
In Deponia, in the middle of the third act, you learn the apparently brain damaged Goal is not irreparably harmed. The connector pins on Goal’s memory cartridge just need to be cleaned. The stakes seem much different and there is no time limit to solving this puzzle, but the setup is nearly the same.
Guybrush is surrounded by sharp implements. A hacksaw, pair of scissors, a knife, a sword, an axe, and a meat cleaver all lie at the bottom of the bay and all are just out of reach. No matter what you look at or what object you use to cut the rope that you click on you are stuck. After about a minute or so, two pirates meet on the dock, and one says he has to get rid of the knife that he just committed a crime with. The other suggests he throws it into the water. The pirate is just about to do so, and you become hopeful that this is the solution to the puzzle. But then, for no reason the pirate decides that he is going to keep the knife. You are stuck in the same situation as before; the rug ripped right out from underneath you.
Rufus, meanwhile, is told that Goal’s memory cartridge is a delicate piece of equipment and just needs some dust cleaned off of it before reinserting it back into her memory implant. Her entire mind is stored in this cartridge, and Rufus must be careful with it. The most obvious item that is available to work with to perform this operation is a feather duster, but after you pick it up, the owner of the boat that you are on informs you that the feather duster is used in cleaning the tanks present on the boat. Going outside, Rufus can unlock and open a chest with a number of cleaning items in it. Inside there is a small brush, a miniature bellows, and a sealed pack of hand wipes. So what does Rufus take? A steel brush and a bottle of degreaser. And, of course, he doesn’t forget to insult the useful items by calling them “useless junk,” “girlie stuff,” saying he “wants to clean a cartridge, not refurbish a doll’s house.”
So what’s the solution to Guybrush’s predicament? He picks up the heavy idol that he’s tied to and walks over to the ladder. What is the solution to Rufus’s task? Use the feather duster on the cartridge contact pins, then use the degreasing bottle to get rid of the grease that the feather duster leaves behind, then use the feather duster again to wipe off the corroding degreasing liquid, and finally use the steel brush to scrape off the junk. He laughs afterwards, “Those scratches could have come from anywhere.”
I know it ruins a joke when you have to explain it, but by doing so, you can see the vast difference between the humor that the two games are trying for. The Secret of Monkey Island is playing off of the player’s knowledge of the genre and what the game has taught them up to this point. The clear problem is being tied to the idol, and instantly, the player’s focus is put on the rope. All of the sharp tools around Guybrush further focus the player on the problem of cutting the rope to escape. There’s nothing in the player’s inventory that can help. Whether they think of it themselves or end up desperately clicking around for a solution, the player will find that while the idol keeps them from moving out of the area to get one of the tools, as per adventure game logic, the player can pick up the idol instead and move on. It’s a brilliant subversion of expectations and allows us either to laugh at the simple, yet not obvious solution or feel clever for having figured it out. In addition, Guybrush gets to be the hero with reality-warping pockets who overcomes the challenge.
What does Rufus do? Effectively, he risks giving Goal brain damage because he’s the lovable idiot archetype so popular in modern television sit-coms. An archetype that is so misused, so often that it seems that every creator forgets the need for well meaning and redemptive aspects being necessary parts of their personalities. The joke is that Rufus decides to not use the safe items because they’re coded as “too feminine” (because they aren’t recklessly inappropriate or potentially dangerous). We are supposed to laugh at his incompetence, but instead I ended up cringing. Hell, his finger would have worked. It’s even more awkward because this is so outside the realm of expectation, but also reasonable enough that we don’t know how to solve the puzzle. I ended up trying each item in turn until the game allowed me to use them at the right time to get through it. It’s even more confusing because you go back to the feather duster for no earthly reason.
At this point, I recognized the origin of this particular puzzle. They both run on the same logic. You are given a particular situation and an obvious solution. However, the obvious solution is not actually doable, and you have to find a comedic work around. The puzzle in The Secret of Monkey Island worked for several reasons. First it provides a limitation that physically prevents the player from using the obvious solution. Then, it gives the player hope that a solution will present itself, before ripping it away. And finally, the actual solution is logical within the world’s context, even if it wasn’t expected.
Deponia fails on each point. There is nothing keeping Rufus from using the proper items except his own misogynistic idiocy. The solution isn’t obvious, nor practical, nor reasonable, nor rational, and the end result is harmful. Why things are funny on a technical level is a difficult thing to explain, but an asshole being obliviously destructive isn’t funny.
Even in failure, The Secret of Monkey Island is able to be far funnier. In the Deponia puzzle, you cannot fail. In fact, you stick with the close up of the cartridge until you solve it by brute force, trying the different options over and over. If time runs out in The Secret of Monkey Island’s puzzle, Guybrush drowns and action commands change to Float, Bloat, Decompose, Bob, Stare, and Order hint book. LucasArts was so far ahead of its time.