We talk Monkey Island, modern adventure games, and time-travel shenanigans with Daedalic Entertainment

07 March 2016 | 1 comment | By Dustin Bailey

The Deponia series, which originally concluded in 2013 with Goodbye Deponia, is getting a parallel timeline adventure in the form of Deponia Doomsday, written and designed by Jan “Poki” Müller-Michaelis, the creator behind much of Daedalic Entertainment’s catalogue of wacky adventures.

I got the chance to sit down with him and chat about Deponia, classic adventure games, and designing new entries in classic genres in an expanding global market.

GameWatcher: Run down the basic outline for me. What’s the setup for Deponia Doomsday?

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: It’s a little bit complicated. The premise is that after Rufus has fallen in Goodbye Deponia (which is of course a big spoiler) he has grown old somehow, rummaging the landscape that’s now trapped in kind of a nuclear winter. Elysium has fallen and there are monsters running around, so he sees no other option but to press the red button that will blow up the whole planet. But soon enough he awakes as a young Rufus again, even before the events of Deponia 1, 2, and 3, and he thinks all of that was just a nightmare, and just goes on with his normal life. Then he recognizes that he can remember situations from his “dream,” and this way he can change things. He learns that maybe this dream was not just a dream, but had something to do with strange time anomalies.

He finds a guy who measures these anomalies around his hometown called McChronicle, and that’s when things start to get really, really weird. Rufus gets his hands on a time machine. We know that he can make things very chaotic without a time machine already and time machines can bring chaos themselves, so it’s a really, really bad mixture.

GameWatcher: Time travel has a grand tradition in video games in general and adventure games in particular. Is that something that factors into the puzzles?

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: Of course. But I think it’s mainly in the introductory chapter and the last third of the game where it really escalates. You may get confused because we try to do every trick in the book with time travel and try to combine everything together. It gets really weird at the end of the game. But I think it’s very much fun, even if you can’t follow all of the timelines anymore, because of course Rufus surely can’t. But it’s good, the option to play the game a couple of times, it will add to the experience if you try to unravel that layer of the story as well, but you don’t need to of course.

GameWatcher: Deponia is obviously very strongly influenced by classic point-and-click adventure games. What would you say the strongest particular influences are?

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: Yeah, I think I’ve never made a big secret of the fact that I’m a big fan of the LucasArts era. Of course in particular the Monkey Island series, but also Maniac Mansion. I think there wasn’t a single game I didn’t enjoy from them. That was what brought me into the industry in the first place, because after they stopped making those games I really missed them, and I found no other developer who made games in such a fashion. So I had the option to do them myself. That was when I was still studying, and so I did my first game which was Edna & Harvey: The Breakout. That was, in a way, the starting point of the company as well. When I finished the first version of the game it was at the end of my studies, and then I met Carsten Fichtelmann, who’s now the CEO of Daedelic. He was already working in the industry, and that brought us together because he recognized that I had to be in the industry.

GameWatcher: Speaking personally, I’m a fan of adventure games, but I haven’t played the Deponia series up until now. What would you say to somebody like me to maybe pitch them on the series and this game in particular?

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: It’s the very best adventure game series there is now! Very positive about that fact! No, really, it is! [laughter]

Most of the adventure games that came after the LucasArts series, they either saw themselves as a device to tell a story or saw themselves as just games and neglected the story. I think that Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert found a way to combine both of them in a very beautiful fashion, and it was for me a starting point that it was not so much a huge gaming genre but it was like a new media in itself. A new device to tell a story.

I tried to connect to that tradition, in a way to tell new stories, and difficult stories maybe even. But doing that in a very enjoyable fashion, with lots of fun. I think there’s something quite unique, because most of my games are quite dramatic in a way, even tragic sometimes, but they are always hilarious fun.

GameWatcher: It’s interesting, that idea of adventure games as a storytelling vehicle, because you look at the trajectory of a company like Telltale that started out making very traditional adventure games, and then just sort of expanded that into something completely different. Do you ever feel any pressure to do something similar to sort of expand the genre like that?

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: I follow the development of Telltale from quite a near perspective because we worked together with them in the first years of the company. We made the German versions of titles like Sam & Max or even Strong Bad. Also Tales of Monkey Island we put in a box here in Germany - putting a game in a box was still a thing back then!

Of course we looked very closely at what they were doing when they made an episodic format, and we always thought about making episodic games as well. I think what Telltale does they do very brilliantly. But I think maybe we would have had a slightly different approach, because they very much go to the end of interactive storytelling without much classical adventure gameplay. You can lose a lot of that and go in that direction, but I think I would try to search for something new. It’s a very, very exciting field to think about it, theoretically.

But I’m still very interested in making big games, and you can’t do that in the episodic format because you always have this breaking point, so you cannot make a location that has a location with 10-20 screens in one game because you already have a big game. The episodic game is always very linear the way Telltale does it. For me to write such a game there’s still something missing that I didn’t come up with yet. Maybe I’ll have eureka moment someday in the future and wake up and say “Now I know how I could do episodic gameplay!” And of course interactive fiction is what we all try to do, but there has to be a little more involvement of the game itself.

GameWatcher: We’ve passed by the big wave where everybody was suddenly excited about point-and-click adventures again, and it’s kind of settled back down into more of a niche. One of the challenges I imagine with Deponia is appealing to that sort of niche style of gameplay without getting trapped as just a nostalgia thing. How does working around that work for you?

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: It’s… It’s working. [laughter] The only thing that’s very hard is to let the people know that it’s working. We are really learning how to do adventure games for a huge mass market target audience, like the old adventure games were back in the 90s. Here in Germany it’s already working. There are young people playing our games who hadn’t even been born when LucasArts brought out Day of the Tentacle. They’re playing our games and it’s a huge and growing audience.

I don’t think that it’s something very classical, or very German. It’s just that we develop our games here so we’re closer to them as an audience. I think that’s the only point. It’s not that our games are too complicated like a classically German strategy game. I don’t think that applies to adventure games because what we do is try to tell a story, and everybody enjoys a good story. We already see that it works, because the people who play our games have the same reactions that they have here in Germany. But it’s hard to let them know that we’re out there, that we’re making those games and bringing them to market, and that they can actually play them. But the number’s growing. I think that word goes around, and in a couple of years other territories will follow.

GameWatcher: Adventure games, especially comedic ones, have a very particular reputation for these wacky puzzles that stretch the bounds of logic. The example I always think of is Monkey Island 2 where you have to use that damn monkey on that damn pipe and it doesn’t make a lick of sense in the world.

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: Oh, it does! I didn’t get it because when I played it I wasn’t so good with the English language, but “monkey wrench!” That’s the clue! It’s a play on words, but of course it was lost in translation. Which is of course always an issue. I like to make many plays on words myself, so we have to take extra effort to make all of them work as well for the English versions. That’s sometimes hard, but surprisingly, I have a couple of situations from Doomsday in mind where the English translation worked better than the German one. [laughter] Because now I always have the English language in mind and sometimes I already word the joke for the English version into the game and it doesn’t function in the German version! Which is no loss, because there’s lots of fun around it. There doesn’t have to be a joke in each and every reaction, but I tried.

GameWatcher: Well even more generally speaking on puzzle designs, how do you balance challenging players to find creative solutions to problems without those solutions being so obscure that it gets frustrating?

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: I think that’s a very hard job because sometimes old adventure game players really enjoy to have more difficult puzzles, to have more difficulty to solve the game. Modern gamers really want to just click and solve the game for themselves often. I read some comments like that from time to time. So you always have to have a balance to that. Of course you always have to have in mind that complaining about a game being too hard is part of the fun about playing games. Nobody would play Mario or Battlefront or something if they would just run through and say “okay, that was easy, I’ve won, and I’ve just played it for the first time!” So the frustration is always a little bit a part of the gameplay. It’s hard to decide which frustration comes from the player over the net to you is real frustration and which is just part of the process of enjoying the game. We try to get that in balance, and I think we’re getting better at that as well. Still, being quite a retro guy I tend to make difficult puzzles in the game and just hope that my colleagues are always at the right time hitting the back of my head and saying “No! You’ve made that puzzle too difficult! It’s one step too much!” and then we ease it a little bit.

GameWatcher: In some of the marketing materials you’ve called this the “largest and longest Deponia adventure yet.” Just how big should we expect this game to be?

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: Yeah, it is. I think it’s more than twice the size of the first Deponia. Thinking about it, the last chapter of these eight chapters is bigger and has more content than the last chapter of the first part. So we have three chapters in Deponia 1, we have eight chapters in Deponia Doomsday. I think it’s quite a sure bet to say that it’s double the size of the first Deponia. Some of the first reviewers say they’ve done it in fifteen hours, but I’ve already read some that say it took them twenty hours. So it’s huge!

GameWatcher: The first three games formed a trilogy. Is this going to be a completely standalone adventure, or is this going to be a jumping-off point for a new part of the series?

Jan “Poki” Muller-Michaelis: I see it as a standalone game. More like a mental wrap-up of the first three parts for me, but that’s from a chronology point of view. It functions on its own, though of course it’s on top of the trilogy, it’s like a second part of the trilogy and not a fourth part. Maybe it should have been a second trilogy! [laughter]

Thanks to Jan for taking the time to speak with us. Deponia Doomsday is a point-and-click adventure in the style of the LucasArts classics, and is available now. You can expect a full review from us later this week.