Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

Publisher: Aspyr

Developer: Funcom

Release Date: 04/17/2006

Available On

The Longest Journey is one of the best adventure titles ever created and one of my personal favorites. It’s so good that even my own mother fell in love with it, and she’s not a gamer. The world, characters, and lore that were built up in The Longest Journey were fascinating. It was well written, and the visuals, for the time, were fantastic. Gameplay-wise it suffered from the usual tropes of adventure games of the time, but Dreamfall is for a next generation of gaming with 3D visuals. The game stars a new protagonist, Zoe Castillo, who awakens in her home in Casablanca and ends up being entangled in a deep corporate conspiracy and needs to find April Ryan.

The game starts out a bit slow. Everything seems just fine, and the game needs to build up this new branch of the story with Zoe. You wake up in your room and talk to your dad, you go outside, you meet a friend at her phone store, and then you end up building towards a relationship with your ex-fling Reza, who is a secret reporter that is on to a big story to bring down the evil corporation WATIcorp, which is known for making AI and robots. April Ryan and Arcadia get involved; I don’t want to spoil how, but she is the second story branch in this game. You do end up in Arcadia for the second third of the game, running around a small town called Marcuria, going back and forth finding objects and talking to people. The last third of the game starts mixing it up, and you go back and forth between Stark (the real world) and Arcadia quite a bit. Familiar faces appear, and then the third story branch of Kian Alvane, an Apostle for a religious sect of Arcadia, sets in.

Gameplay is very minimal. Puzzles aren’t challenging and are very sparse. They consist of glyph matching against a timer and glyph spinners. They appear to have been tacked on at the last moment, a common occurrence in adventure games from this era. You can combine objects to solve puzzles, but this doesn’t happen very often. Objects are obvious and easy to come by, as there aren’t that many interactive objects in the game. Green brackets will appear over everything you can interact with, and most of them just have the character explain what it is. The first two-thirds of the game is more gameplay-heavy with a couple of stealth areas and combat. Yes, combat. It’s atrocious and shouldn’t have been put in. The animations are stiff and slow, and the controls feel like mud. There is a block button, and you can dodge, but the AI is unintelligent and just wails at you or repeats patterns. There is a light and heavy attack, but honestly you just need to mash the heavy attack and you will win. There are only a couple of fights in the game, and any others you won’t win, and you’ll essentially fail a stealth section.

The last third of the game is clearly rushed, and the game obviously wasn’t completed. This section is mostly just cutscenes and dialogue. Kian’s and April’s sections just end with no conclusion, and Zoe’s section is the only branch that feels complete in a way, with a proper cliffhanger for a sequel. I just found it odd that each chapter took nearly two hours to finish, and around chapter 7 I’m finishing them in a matter of minutes, and there are no more puzzles or gameplay. Even for what’s here, 12 hours is quite long for an adventure title. I feel this needed to be 20 to feel fully complete. Thankfully it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The writing is great, the voice acting is decent, and the world and characters are really interesting.

The visuals hold up surprisingly well even today. The large vistas look beautiful with great lighting effects. There’s a lot of detail put into everything from icicles hanging off of the bottom of bridges to detailed ornamentation in walls and stones that didn’t need to be there for a game of this era. Sadly, the PC version has terrible controller support, but this was pre-Games for Windows, so there was no universal controller standard for PC games back then. This game is still easily one of the best adventure titles ever made thanks to the fantastic lore, world-building, and writing. I couldn’t put the game down. I do recommend playing the first game, as this is a direct continuation, but the game does a good job filling you in on everything as the game goes along.