So, I recently played a game called Deponia. It’s one of those point-and-click adventure games in the style of Monkey Island and its like, released in 2012. It’s got an appealing artstyle, some clever writing, and it earned cult appeal when it was released, blah blah blah. I’m not talking about any of that. I wanna talk about the game’s protagonist and why I think he suuuuucks.

For context, the game is sort of a sci-fi adventure, set in a world divided into two: the flying city of Elysium, which is a paradise for the overprivileged elites of society, and the trash planet of Deponia, which lives off of the refuse tossed down to them by the people of Elysium, not unlike the relationship that inner west Sydney has with the rest of Sydney. You play as Rufus, a guy stuck on the latter location trying to escape to the former via all manner of unhinged plans. Firing himself up there on a rocket, magnetising himself to a spaceship, and so on and so forth. During one such attempt, he accidentally sends a girl from Elysium down to Deponia, called…

…“Goal”. As in, she is his primary quest objective. Because the first half of the game seems to revolve around getting her to wake up from the coma that she went into after crash-landing onto a planet made entirely of rust and scrap metal. Rufus gets it into his head that if she wakes up, she’ll somehow see him as her “saviour”, and she’ll be so grateful that she’ll take him to Elysium and he won’t even need to blow himself up once. And thus, the game begins.

Full disclosure, I have not finished the game yet. In fact, I’ve only got about two hours into it and I’m not experiencing much drive to add more. Part of it is the standard adventure game problem, where the solutions to the puzzles are so obtuse that you spend half the game running around rubbing every inventory item onto every interactable object, but another part of it is the fact that I just… don’t really like Rufus.

Rufus is a man of many flaws. He’s rude, egocentric, sloppy, selfish, and thinks that everyone else around him is a drooling idiot. He thinks of himself as some kind of once-in-a-lifetime genius, whose plans only go awry due to the interference of other people, all the while refusing to admit that every one of his plans have failed due to his own lack of foresight and competence, and while living rent-free in his ex-girlfriend’s house like the freeloader that he is.

Incidentally, the ex-girlfriend character is great. Like, every scene I’ve seen so far with her, she’s just digging into Rufus ruthlessly, pointing out all of his issues for the world to see. She’s brilliant.

And it’s not as if the game is unaware of how pathetic Rufus is. Every other character in the game is just as fed up with him as I am, and wishes he’ll get his wish of getting to Deponia just so he’ll get out of their hair, but it doesn’t make it any easier to sympathise with him. It’s not even that he’s despicable, he’s just… annoying. I’m supposed to want to see him succeed, get to Elysium, get the girl, but I just… don’t.

I get the archetype he’s trying to fill, “jerk with a heart of gold” or something, but I’m not seeing much of the heart of gold, frankly. Maybe he learns his lesson later in the game, I wouldn’t know. I need a reason to want to see him succeed, and I frankly just don’t have one.

Anyway, excerpt for Clanless next week.