Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

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.