Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

The Good
April Ryan returns in the sequel to The Longest Journey, along with two new characters to control, Zoë Castillo and Kian. You'll actually be controlling Zoë for about half the game. There's several characters and locations that will be familiar if you played the first game, but a lot has changed in the ten years since the first adventure, the story however is as developed as ever and the gaps will be filled in as you meet old friends and foes, and that's what this game is essentially all about, story, it's a game excuse for telling a reasonably long story, and it's told with a bit of film style directing.

And it's fun, sitting back and relaxing and listening to the conversations and watching the cutscenes is, well, relaxing. There's conversation options, which affect what you say or how you say it, they’ll be a descriptive sentence telling the thoughts of the character you happen to be controlling under each option, which is typically one word, such as a persons name or a reaction. It's not too involving, and everything ends up in the same place, Dreamfall is an extremely linear game, but it adds a flavour of variety.

There's the obligatory spooky girl ala The Ring / F.E.A.R. who visits Zoë via visions and TV screens, she has seemingly infiltrated ‘The Wire’, which is a worldwide network that everything is connected to (undies, toasters etc), the concept is certainly feasible, you'll even be using a mobile phone to keep in contact with friends and family (and hack corporate security systems).

Tapping the right mouse button lights up a blue line of sight beam from your character's toes to the top of the screen which can then be swept left and right highlighting any objects of interactivity or comment-worthiness.

The sets can be large and are usually quite pretty.

There’s combat, a strong attack, a normal attack, and the ability to block. Dreamfall’s combat has received a lot of criticism, or at least some people may be questioning it’s inclusion, and I can see why. I did however enjoy knocking out that secretarial security woman near the beginning of the game, and afterwards was as surprised as Zoë that the whole thing had actually happened!

The Bad
Although the sets can be large and usually quite pretty they're not very interactive, for example there’s only one pub that you can actually enter in Marcuria, despite their being several other establishments as just scenery with signs and front doors and all the indications of something actually being there, but with no way of interacting with them.

Like in the first game the conversations can drag a little and seem a little ordinary on occasions, though there's a decent story here too - and one that's told from perspectives of several characters (player and npc's alike).

The voice acting for Zoë is very bland with only the slightest hint of occasional emotion, I kid you not, I began to think that maybe it was the script, but other characters, some returning from the first game, do a much better job.

The Bottom Line
Dreamfall ends on a cliff hanger, it's essentially half a story, and half a story I enjoyed very much, I've had my Sunday roast now I want my crumble and custard and coffee by the fire, and a tale or two to finish the evening off. What I mean to say is that there are very few loose ends tied off, if any, there's going to be a sequel, and I'm looking forward to it.

P.S.

Make sure you let the credits roll, as there’s a final scene at the end.

The Good
Dreamfall has a great atmosphere, just like in The Longest Journey which I love. Deep into the game when the story gets darker, the music and environment perform a fantastic job, and you really get inside the rotten events in both Stark and Arcadia.

It's great to see some old characters return and find out what's been going on with them. It helps keep a familiar environment that could have been lost since Dreamfall doesn't let you exclusively play April Ryan.

The story is fascinating and really sucks you in, you experience a rich world (or perhaps I should say "worlds") with colorful environments as well as gritty locations.

The Bad
The game doesn't feel much like a game. The player is just a person turning the pages in a story by solving extremely simple puzzles and running from one place to another. The puzzles are so simple that you hardly have even 3 objects in your inventory at a time, and each problem can be solved somewhere in the surrounding of where it has originated. To make it worse, the game tends to send hints about the solution (or just tells you the solution) before you even have a chance to feel like you're actually giving the puzzle some thought.

There are action bits that aren't ripe yet, the fighting system is simple and sluggish, you don't feel like you're really controlling your character during a fight. Once you get the trick and don't try to rush things up, you can come out of each battle without a scratch.

Without saying much, the ending is quite a cliffhanger. The game feels more like an exposition for one big story that would truly make one of the longest journeys out there.

The Bottom Line
Overall it's a great story to listen to and the gameplay isn't bad, just simple and unsatisfying. It's worth playing just to get sucked into a fascinating tale and expand the world you've experienced in the first game of the series.

The Good
Unlike its predecessor The Longest Journey, which was more like a sleeper hit at its time, the release of Dreamfall was surrounded by big hype. It's obvious that the developers of this game came under much more pressure than when they were making The Longest Journey. The latter's success put Dreamfall into a difficult position. It had fairly large shoes to fill, it had to deliver a story that would match its predecessor in quality, and it had to do something about the dead end adventure games found themselves in.

The much-famed story of Dreamfall has a good pace, and the dialogues that advance it are well-written for the most part. The initial introduction of the mystery is indeed impressive, captivating the player from the very beginning. It's of those stories that doesn't let you go until you finish it. You'll want to play the game until the end. So many things in it annoyed me, yet I always kept pressing forward. If you compare Dreamfall to a book, it would be one in which you keep turning the pages feverishly, trying to swallow the whole story in one gulp - regardless of the actual quality of the narrative or its conclusion.

The short gameplay time is only very slightly compensated by the variety of locations. There are sharp contrasts between Stark and Arcadia, and also between different parts of them. The switch between the sunny Casablanca and the depressing Newport in the initial part of the game is just the beginning of location-jumping that will accompany you till the end. Dreamfall still feels like a journey.

The Bad
Everything you've heard about the thin gameplay of Dreamfall is unfortunately true. First of all, it has no puzzles. None at all - neither good nor bad ones. If I had to choose between cat mustaches and the barely existing, ridiculous kindergarden-level exercises you have here, I'd be collecting feline fur for the follicly challenged in no time. I admit that even Dreamfall's own predecessor had its awkward moments when it tried to impose old-school comical inventory item-juggling on the serious story. But that is still thousand times better than a game that basically plays itself.

The absence of puzzles is not the only thing that hurts the game badly. There's precious little interaction in Dreamfall, and I can't help feeling terribly disappointed when I think how enormously enriched the game would have been if the developers added more accessible locations. In Marcuria, there are three or four taverns, but you can only enter one. There are plenty of houses, but you can enter none. When you arrive to the Dark People country, all you can do is run in a straight line from the ship to the library. You can't do anything on your way. Mind you, the location is beautiful; you want to explore it, but you can't. Even as Zoe, you can't explore much; so what is left to say about Kian? The most enigmatic of the three game protagonists barely gets game time anyway. But when he is finally on stage, he is confined to tiny areas where cannot do anything but run to his next objective.

You can feel the developers' intentions behind many actions you must take in the game all too clearly, and that is a bad symptom. They might have discarded the typical complexity and lack of logic found in adventure game puzzles, but they haven't got rid of their artificial nature. And it became only more obvious since the tasks you have to perform in the game are now stripped of challenge to obfuscate their true nature.

Instead of enlarging its world, Dreamfall attempts to bring some variety into the gameplay with its fighting sequences. I think you've heard enough about those. But you must experience them to believe how bad they really are. They make absolutely no sense. If you can win a fight, you will win it. Just press the "strong attack" button several times. If you aren't supposed to win a fight, you won't, no matter how hard you try. The opponents' behavior is idiotic beyond belief. If, for example, you fight two people, one of them will patiently stand and wait till you hack his friend to death before he attacks you. You can't move normally during fights, and the awful camera doesn't help much, either. And yet, the fights you are supposed to win are still pitifully easy.

Which brings me to the next point: why let the player choose if all the choices lead to the same result anyway? You'll be often given several dialogue options, but they are merely cosmetic. No matter what you choose, the result will be the same. Only on one or two occasions, you'll have a "wrong" dialogue choice that will lead to a fight you won't be able to win. Which is just a fancy way of saying "Game Over". I was really angry when I saw how blatantly unimportant those choices were. I could have halfway accepted it if Dreamfall was honest in its linearity, but why deceive the player like that? The most infuriating "dialogue choice" came near the end of the game. You must decide whether to kill a certain character or to spare his life. Out of understandable curiosity, I selected the "kill" option. The protagonist said something like: "Yes, I'll have to kill you", and after a short break: "No, I can't do that!". Really, I'm not joking. And this is supposed to be a choice?! It's like in Japanese RPGs, where you can select "No" as much as you want, but will still be forced to accept every quest you're given.

As for the story, I didn't find it great at all. Good, but definitely not enough to make up for all those gameplay deficiencies. Many times I felt that Ragnar Tornquist was suffering from a "Hideo Kojima syndrome". You know what I mean - when the writer can't resist the temptation of using his story as a receptacle for his ideas. Many times these inclusions are too obvious, and then the quality of the story suffers greatly. What happens in Dreamfall is that its message is too obvious. The writer makes the common mistake of spelling out things for you instead of just indicating them. He tries very hard to convince you that religious intolerance is bad and that you shouldn't trust big corporations - messages that have been done to death in various works of fiction. But even those messages would have had more weight if the writer let the players come to conclusions instead of putting them in plain view.

The story is also blatantly underdeveloped and lacks detail. What do we learn about the Six? Nothing. We just realize that they are obviously evil. But what is their motivation? We don't know. Much of the characterization is flat, descending into cliches, generalizations, and trivialities that even Japanese RPGs try to stay away from. The motives of the characters are often poorly explained; for example, there is nothing convincing in Kian's ideological changes, and the whole thing feels awfully rushed.

The writing can get corny. I found the comic relief largely inappropriate, especially the pop culture references in Crow's dialogues. Anachronisms should also be done with style, as early Monkey Island games showed.

The story of Dreamfall is also clearly unfinished. It's true that Zoe's story is more or less resolved in the end, but we are left with so many unanswered questions that you want to scream "Where is the second part?!" after you finish the game. You'll begin doubting whether they sold you all the game discs when you have completed it.

The Bottom Line
Dreamfall is a disappointment on all fronts. Its gameplay is disastrously shallow and unsatisfying. Despite the strong beginning, the story fails to reach the expected quality. Any adventure classic of the past will provide more compelling gameplay; and if you are interested in "philosophical", larger-than-life melodrama... well, there are always Japanese games out there.

The Good
The graphics of Dreamfall are the strongest part of the game obviously. The locations remain exact replicates of the locations in the first game(except those who are new of course) and everything looks absolutely stunning(taken you have the machine to run this game on optimal performance that is). The models look realistic(my biggest grief with the first game were the models which always looked too polygonized for me), but sadly, that's where the game stops impressing me.

The Bad
Because underneath the layer of impressive state-of-the-art graphics, lie a confusing story with thousands of continuity issues, horrendous voice acting, and music that fails to live up to the awesome jazzy tracks of the first game. The decision to not have the Jukebox in the Fringe Cafe in the sequel just baffles me, it was one of the coolest elements of the first game and I missed it. A lot.

As mentioned, the story is very confusing and a lot of it makes no sense if you keep the first game in mind. 1. Charlie is still working on the Fringe Cafe, 10 years after the first game, where he mentioned that the job on the cafe was only to pay for his education(he was studying to be a dancer). Therefore, he either failed miserably on his biggest dream, or the writers just didn't keep in mind he studied to be a dancer. He never mentions in the script of Dreamfall that he wanted to be a dancer, only that he took over the cafe after the previous owner, Stan. 2. Emma(who looks nothing like she did in the first game) mentions that when April told that she had gone to another dimension, she believed April and Charlie was the one in doubt. In fact, April never tells Emma and Charlie about Arcadia in the first game, and Charlie was the one who wanted to listen while Emma claimed April had gone mad. 3. Despite this being a game developed by Norwegians, the Norwegian version of Dreamfall sounds terrible. It's more like a badly translated version of the English script. While in the first game, the script was all Norwegian, the Norwegian script in Dreamfall contains a lot of English words for places and names(which makes no sense since they were Norwegian words in the first game). Also, a lot of the voice actors have been replaced. I have nothing against Petronella Barker, but I think a lot of the fans were disappointed that Synnøve Svabo didn't return to her role as April Ryan.

I have one thing to say about the voice acting: It sucks! The actors don't sound like they know what they are saying, they also sound completely uninterested, like they were paid to say the lines, but never instructed on what they are talking about. The music sounds incredibly stock, but this is perhaps done on purpose to make you pay more attention to the lackluster voice acting...

The Bottom Line
Compared to The Longest Journey, Dreamfall is a sequel that could have been an awesome game with awesome graphics, but because of the issues I had with the story and the voice acting, which should be the essences in the game, it fails to impress me. Not to mention it has been simplified and the action elements makes it feel more like an action game than an adventure game.

The adventure genre is clearly decaying, which this game really shows. Stick to the first game, it may not have impressive graphics, but the original story remains the best.

Why this became the Game Of The Year is beyond my comprehension.

The Good
The story was interesting. Not quite as epic as The Longest Journey, nor as long. It was a valiant attempt to expand the universe beyond the first game, which told a self-contained story. The graphics are excellent for both the fantasy world of Arcadia and high science world of Stark. They also brought back of the original voice actors for the English release of The Longest Journey, April in particular. The music is top notch and the voice acting generally is professionally done.

The Bad
The story "has a message", wants "to be relevant to our times" and drives it home in a very unsubtle fashion. The game's length is heavily extended due to the all the voice acting. It would be a lot shorter if you only read it.

The actual gameplay is very weak. The adventure gaming is mostly of the walk and talk variety with few puzzles. I recall there was one chapter without any actual puzzles. None of the puzzles are as intricate or as maddening as The Longest Journey.

Before the game's initial release, there was some controversy as the developers included fighting and stealth elements into the game. Some of these can be avoided, but these features are amateur hour at best. The fighting is only slightly more complex than the game Urban Champion for the NES, and the stealth elements are scarcely more advanced than the original Metal Gear for the MSX/NES. In 2006, these felt like such an afterthought or a weak attempt to get the game onto consoles where a pure adventure would have no chance.

Almost seven years later and this game with its cliffhanger ending still has no sequel. One does feel cheated after spending a not inconsiderable period of time with this game. However, thanks to Kickstarter and the Norwegian Film Institute, a sequel is finally going to be made.

The Bottom Line
A fine example of digital storytelling, with the occasional nuisance of actually having to do something.

The Good
The plot is rather good, but while playing the game a perceptive person cannot avoid noticing the similarity between this game and others famous gems. While this doesn’t make the game less enjoyable at first glance, it's rather dull, when you stop and think: haven’t I played this before? Fortunately, as the plot is very straight, you may hang for a while without thinking this too much. The graphics are also very good. It’s clear that they put a lot of effort in them. You probably will stop some times just to look at the surroundings. The cutscenes taking place during the dialogues are entertaining too, even though the facial animations are not as great as the graphics in general or the voice acting, that is terrific. The descriptions you receive from your current character (there are three that you must direct through the game) when looking to something are fantastic, they are the main mechanic that reveals theirs full personality, without any long introductions or such. Making the player take attention to them is a great way to attach the player to the characters, making the plot significantly more interesting.

The Bad
One major problem is the emptiness you will few when exploring a whole new city. You won’t be able to enter a single place that isn’t direct linked with your next objective. I know that a different approach could be a enormous task, however, I don’t think that would hurt the developers if they added access to at least all the taverns. That would have a good impact in the game, making it appears less hollow, like it does sometimes. Giving the player some options would be fantastic too. Dialogue in this game is pretty useless, as almost every option leads to the same place. In the entire game, there is just a couple of "wrong" answers that are pretty obvious. The linearity of the plot is awkward. In one part of the game you will be controlling one assassin named Kian and you will have to choose if you want to kill your target or not, but even if you want to, you really can't, as your character will refuse to do so. In the last part of the game there is an even worse mandatory action: while watching the cutscenes, your character chooses a to agree with a very bad idea, that if you were taking attention to the plot unfolding, you would know that this action is something risk and probably in vain. Would hurt the developers if they featured some "real" dialogue options? Would hurt them if they created some alternative endings? While these may look like petty matters, there would be a real difference in the game if they were well implemented. Still, due the lack of options (how many adventures released in late 00's, had so much hype?), it's a game that should definitely be played.

The Bottom Line
I could start this part of my review in a different fashion, however I can’t hope but to let know straight what I think happened when the game was been developed:

-Hey everyone, The Longest Journey was really good, but it didn’t filled our pockets with endless money, so we need a sequel, and it must be a real good one, in order to sell well. Does anybody have an idea?

-I do, sir. Why don’t we put a hot girl as the main protagonist? We could show her in the cover as well.

-But we had a sort of that in the last game, and what about the rating? If we push too far it won’t even be sold in most game stores, you know .But, eureka, we could just show her a bit underdressed sometimes, and in the rest of the time, the gamers imagination should be fulfilled with all kind of suggestive stuff, like “a boyfriend’s bed that bounces”, “the salty seamen”, “the cock and the puss”, "April's rod of Joie covered with scented lubricant" or "Reza's dreams with Zoe, naked, sweating and moaning". Yeah, that’s really good.

-And why not make every character in the game beautiful as well? More is better.

-That’s a good idea, in fact we could put two or three protagonists now. Anachronox did it, and did it well.

-So let’s just recycle that April, from the previous game, we could recycle a bunch of he story as well. Traveling between parallel worlds hasn’t been so cool since Outcast.

-Talking about Outcast, we should be aware of the combat system and it’s length. Back in 1999, Outcast was praised, but some guys hated it because of the huge amount of quests you can do at once and because the difficult combat for some. So let’s do the following: We take the Outcast gameplay, but this game should be linear and the combat very easy if the protagonist are supposed to win in order to advance the story.

-But let’s just add some conversation options, alright? This way the players will not notice that they will end in the same place no matter what they choose to say, and if anybody thinks it’s a bad idea, it is exactly what happens in the Lucas Arts adventures, like Full Throttle or Grim Fandango, no matter what the protagonist says, it will never make you become stuck. And above all, Manny Cavalera turning his head towards important items was quite a help.

-That’s right, but let’s just make a couple of obvious wrong answers in the game, so the critics cannot say the dialogue is useless. Getting rid of difficult puzzles should also be an important matter. If advancing in the plot is easy, I think non-hardcore adventure players may buy the game too.

-Good, that’s just something I think we forgot: Deus Ex. What can we borrow from it? That’s too great to simply ignore.

-I don’t know. Maybe we should just take the French boîte from Nicollet and place some other night club in this game, with the same atmosphere, preferably right before a major twist in the plot. Let’s also replace those UNATCO guys with something like it. I don’t know maybe “The Eye” is a good name. Every game should have a big and mean govern agency or corporation.Why not a core level too?

-This will do. Ok guys, I think we have enough, in fact this is enough to have our hands full, as I don’t think we will be able to release the game on schedule if we implement all these ideas and write an end for it. So let’s start the work, end if we don’t have time for a proper end, let’s just put a cutscene like there will be a sequel or something like this to be released soon. We already flooded the game with cutscenes with that Samara Morgan wannabe.

Well, that’s it. If you read everything until now, you should be aware of how the game is.

The Good
The story. This is really a novel in game form, and everything takes a back seat to the story. The game comes on six CDs, probably because it includes so many lengthy cutscenes. The story is long for a game (as was The Longest Journey), and takes the time to build up properly.

The characters. It's rare to see a game with significant character development, but Dreamfall takes the time to do it. There are a few scenes that could have come across as cheesy, but since we've traveled with the characters and sympathize with them, they work.

The scenery. As in the Myst games, many of the game locations are beautiful, and you just want to wander around and gawk (which you're free to do).

The Bad
It's too easy. As I said, everything takes a back seat to the story, and this includes the gameplay: there are precious few puzzles, and none of them are very hard. The only time I had to consult a walkthrough, it turned out that I had the right idea, but wasn't doing it in just the way that the game wanted. In some cases, the "game" consists in nothing more than getting a plot point from one cutscene, then walking across town to watch the next cutscene.

Linearity. The story of Dreamfall is told in one particular way, and the player has to follow along. Consequently, there's only one thing to do at any time. As a corollary, if you get stuck on one task, you're stuck. Unlike a game like The Secret of Monkey Island, there's nothing else to work on.

The interface. Unlike The Longest Journey, Dreamfall is a third-person 3-D environment. This means that you can now look around in all directions, but comes with some problems. The camera tries to be smart, and swivels around the main character rather unpredictably. At the same time, movement is camera-relative, not character-relative, so if you have Zoë walk toward you, and the camera swivels to avoid a wall or something, you'll find that she's now walking at a right angle to the way you want her to go.

Combat. Yes, this is an adventure game that includes some combat scenes, and your character can die. But if he or she does, the game gives you a chance to try again. I'm not a big fan of timed sequences in adventure games (where you have a limited amount of time to complete some action), since I prefer puzzles that make me think, rather than test my agility; and the combat sequences in Dreamfall have all of the disadvantages of timed sequences, doubled.

The graphics. Yes, I know I said the scenery is beautiful. But it's also 3-D, which means that everything has to be rendered in real time as textured polygons. If this had been a node-based game, they could have prerendered the scenes in a lot more detail (compare Myst: Uru to, say, Riven to see what I mean).

The voice acting. Most of the actors give decent performances, but a few were just bad (yeah, I'm talking about you, French magic-user!).

The ending. There's going to be a sequel to Dreamfall, and this couldn't have been more obvious if they'd tacked on "To be continued..." at the end.

The Bottom Line
Well worth playing, IMHO. The story is engaging, and the characters reasonably three-dimensional. The game is long enough to let us know the characters and empathize with them. Just don't expect challenging puzzles, or even a lot of gameplay.

The Good
I liked everything in this game. This is one of the most genius games created ever and it was a perfect sequel. Some sequels out there forget how the areas looked in the prequel (like Diablo 2) and that will result in a mess. Dreamfall did not make that mistake. I completely recognized all the places from the prequel and that was most satisfying.

The characters were beautifully made and when I started this game for the first time I completely fell in love with Zoë as a character. The game was long and you could sit and play the game for a day without getting tired of it. The changing of the environments are the best I've seen.

This game was like watching a 15-20 hours long movie (though one of the best movies I've ever seen)

The Bad
The only thing that I even thought about was that you didn't actually play that much if you compare to the first one. Not too much of a challenge, but everything else in the game did actually compensate that without problem.

The Bottom Line
I would say this is one of the best games I've ever played. The game is perfect (except that it's not too hard), the music is wonderful and fits the game perfect, the story is stunning, the graphics are beautiful, the characters are unique, even the citizens.

Well I'm completely shocked how this game affected me and I will never forget this ever! If it would have been a little more challenging I would have given it 100/100, but now 95/100!

The Good
The biggest (and arguably the only) strength of Dreamfall is the same as in The Longest Journey: the worlds of Stark and Arcade are absolutely fascinating and the characters are likeable and occasionally funny. It is a delight to learn more about them, especially because the dialogue is mostly more condensed than in TLJ. I also liked the switching between protagonists which allowed Funcom to show different perspectives on Arcadia and was used for a few clever sequences.

The Bad
Unfortunately Dreamfall also inherits the gameplay weakness of TLJ. It tries to be varied and introduces four gameplay pillars which all fail: puzzles (most of them don't deserve the name and the few which do are badly implemented), mini-games (both the too easy lockpicking and the too hectic hacking mini-games are only used a few times), fighting (the controls are clunky and the enemies brain-dead) and stealth (clunky, but at least easy). All those gameplay mechanics add absolutely nothing to the game or the narrative and could have been cut without losing anything substantial.

I also did not like the environments. Especially the outside areas look very pretty, but they also feel cold and sterile and are frequently interrupted by loading screens. Dreamfall manages to build its areas both too small and linear (there is mostly only one way to go and nothing interesting to find which isn't part of the plot) and too vast (some areas are bigger, but almost completely empty, and there is too much backtracking).

While my last point is a bit moot since the release of Dreamfall Chapters, I also have to address the non-ending. It cuts off right in the middle of the story: there is nothing gained and almost nothing resolved. The game opens up way too many story threads which lead to nothing or cliffhangers. While open endings or even sequel hooks are fine, a game has to wrap up at least the main story in a satisfying way.

The Bottom Line
On first glance, Dreamfall is a completely different game than The Longest Journey: different protagonist, different game mechanics, different perspective. But a closer evaluation shows it has the same strengths and weaknesses: the characters and the world are good, the plot is decent, and the gameplay sucks. It is a shame this game was made before the rise of narrative games: it probably would have profited by cutting the bad gameplay and focusing on better storytelling instead.