Daedalic is giving away the original Deponia on Steam

Daedalic Entertainment has made the original Deponia free to claim on Steam until March 16, 2026. While Deponia is available on multiple platforms, this current giveaway making the game free to claim is exclusive to Steam. The giveaway is part of a broader publisher sale for the company. Anyone can add the 2012 point-and-click adventure to their library permanently at no cost, according to a Steam Community post highlighted by the Free Games Finders group.

I haven't tried this one. But I have added it to my library. Free is free and I'm a digital hoarder.

Deponia follows Rufus, a spectacularly unlikable protagonist living on a planet covered entirely in garbage. His singular goal is to escape to Elysium, a pristine floating city in the sky. To get there, players have to click through screens of hand-drawn 2D art, combine bizarre inventory items, and solve puzzles that lean heavily into classic LucasArts-style moon logic.

Four games and a trash planet

Daedalic built its entire reputation on games exactly like this one. Throughout the 2010s, the German studio was one of the few companies still aggressively producing traditional point-and-click adventures. Deponia was their biggest hit. The game eventually spawned three direct sequels: Chaos on Deponia, Goodbye Deponia, and Deponia Doomsday. The franchise sold millions of copies across various platforms and kept the studio afloat for years.

Players jumping in today should expect some friction. The puzzle design in Deponia is notoriously obtuse. You will frequently find yourself combining a stray sock with a mechanical pigeon just to see what happens. We have all been there. You stare at a static screen at 2am and click every item in your inventory against every object in the room until something works.

The humor is also very specific to early 2010s German adventure games. This translates to a lot of cynical dialogue and a main character who actively makes things worse for everyone around him. Rufus is not a hero. He is a menace to his own society, and the game expects you to find his terrible decisions entertaining.

No more internal development

Things look very different for Daedalic today. In 2023, the studio released The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. The stealth action game launched to brutal reviews and severe technical issues. The fallout was immediate and permanent. Within weeks of that release, Daedalic shut down its internal development division entirely. The company laid off 25 employees and canceled a second Lord of the Rings project.

The company now operates strictly as a publisher for third-party indie developers. They handle titles like Inkulinati and Unrailed. Game creation is left to other teams. That makes this current Steam promotion a look back at an era of the studio that no longer exists. They are currently discounting the games they publish, but they are giving away the game they actually built.