Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

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 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.

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.