Deponia (2012)

This was incredibly irritating from the off because it's the initial trilogy bundled into one app and it's bizarrely unclear whether you're picking the right game to play and then there's an obnoxious and over-written tutorial that you have to get through to find out. But it's not really fair to blame the game for that.

The game itself does look lovely, although the animation can sometimes feel very Flash and sometimes very low-frame. Generally nice, though. The puzzles so far have been a bit crap, I've mainly muddled through thanks to not having very many options to play with. Now the game's opening up, I'm not sure how well I'll do. The story isn't particularly interesting and the guy you're playing really is very unlikeable. Just a charmless, mildly misogynist man-child. Currently my goal is to wake up an upper-class woman (whose name is literally Goal) whom I've never met but am having romantic fantasies about. Adventure games really don't do too well with their romance sub-plots... Anyway, I'm not hating it but I'm also not particularly bowled over by it.
It has a To Do list (blech). Simultaneously a crutch to lean on instead of properly signposting your puzzles, and a way to lay bare the mechanics of your game and kill all immersion. It's probably lucky this game has it, though, as the writing and puzzles can be really unclear.
Oh, and there's a character who is basically one big transphobic joke. Probably didn't get much pushback in 2012, though - I'll be interested to read some contemporary reviews.

I got a bit further, but I've resorted to using a walkthrough if I get stuck at all, because the signposting, translation and puzzles are all fairly dreadful. Also, I realised that this lead character is written like one of those movie school bullies who say needlessly cruel things the whole time with a shit-eating grin and no real wit. In those movies, it's good that you want to reach into the screen and throttle them; for an adventure game protagonist, not so much. Plus, I just got to a fucking logic puzzle. It's the one where you rotate discs to get beads lined up in the right way. So fucking unimaginative, it's always the same damn three puzzles that get used.
I kind of want to see what happens when I get through this section, so I might push on for a bit longer, but I have the horrible feeling it's just going to open up some more puzzles in this same trash planet setting.

After a long break, couldn't be bothered to play any more. I skimmed a playthrough vid for the rest of it and I definitely made the right decision - just a bunch more junk planet rooms and more logic puzzles, while you lug the unconscious princess around like a sack of meat, making sure her lycra-clad arse is drawn in great detail and pointed straight at camera, until she wakes up and you wipe her memory repeatedly for your own gain. Then there's an unsatisfying cliffhanger ending and that the lot. I think I'll give the next two a quick go when they come up in the list, but I'll give them a lot less leeway as this one was so bad, and they were all produced so close together, so it's unlikely they'll be much better. I think there are some later games that I might have, but iirc they got even worse reviews!

Rating: Nice art (when still) but otherwise obnoxious and irritating.