Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

First and foremost, the ending SUCKS. Yes, I'll put it out right there: it will leave you hanging and six years later us fans have not had the closure we deserved. The promised episodic gaming sequels never came about. They still may, according to the creators, but yeah right. Also, the stealth and action sequences are highly annoying and subpar. Aside from that? Gorgeous, great voice acting, great story, great music, six years later it's still haunting and easy to remember its great sequences. Well worth playing if you don't mind the problems.

It's a good game, I have enjoyed playing it. But the change from point and click adventure to third person adventure is not flawless. I don't liked the combat parts of this game, they were too flat and you cannot skip them. Also sneaking parts are boring. If you endure these worse parts you will get an excellent adventure game that will extend the story of The Longest Journey.

Dreamfall is the sequel to The Longest Journey, a rather famous and well received adventure game. It was simply great, with interesting, witty characters, nice (if a bit difficult at times) puzzles, an interesting story, a well constructed atmosphere. Every part of the game deserves praise, in my opinion. This is partly why I am so harsh on Dreamfall, but in all honesty, I wouldn't have liked it even if it wasn't a sequel to a really marvelous game. Let's start with the gameplay: the puzzles aren't simply easy, they are almost non-existent, you get fetch-quests that are just two screens away from point A to point B, whenever you get to pick a different dialogue (sometimes you get to pick only one response, for whatever reason), there are barely any differences, not even new information, making the entire process feel particularly pointless. The fighting system is bad, REALLY bad and uninteresting, and the same can be said for the sneaking mechanics. More often than not, you pick up an item and use it all in the same screen, and you never get to think about what you should do to overcome an obstacle. The three playable characters all have the same gameplay mechanics. The story: Without any spoilers, this was a sequel with another sequel in mind, but it ends by closing only a single thread, and it's just a secondary one. No explanations on the how, things just happen and you have to deal with whatever the narrative throws at you. There are characters that have literally no value from a narrative POV, and get in fact killed by the end of the game, with no repercussions at all (hopefully, you'll get what I mean once you see it happen in game). This character is also bad because his very nature is totally unbeliavable, unexplained, and his goals are laughable, and yet those drive a good part of the story. Despite that, his disappearance at the end doesn't change anything, if he was never there since the beginning, the story would have been just the same). New characters and elements are introduced at the very end of the game, with no explanations whatsoever. As a side note, this can be considered a sequel only because the story happens in the same universe, and you get to see some of the old characters. The old story is barely a background, and what happened in between the two games (despite deeply affecting the old characters) gets only mentioned, without showing us anything (more in the "characters" sub-section). The game totally forgoes player agency, and interactivity on the most basics levels (you could examine anything in the prequel, and get a good laugh out of it, thanks to the witty writing, while here you are so railroaded that even descriptions are few and far in-between). You would expect good storytelling, in exchange... But this isn't the case: the story telling is fractured, and the different characters we play don't give us very different points of view on the situation because each follow his/her different goals, and they barely interact with each other, directly or indirectly. They meet, but despite the clearly intended (by the author) influence they should have on each other, nothing is shown (no internal turmoil, no character development, nothing). Again, things just happens, and you have to deal with it. The story also suffers from a major lack in exposition, as you seem to walk/travel around without really understanding why. You are given reasons, but they all seem very weak. The Characters: The main character is apathetic, by her own definition (which isn't exactly a good way to introduce a new character... No goal at all isn't good to make us interested in her, although it's not a deal-breaker on its own). Her actions seem to always go against this definition, though, as she struggles (albeit with little to no result or focus) against the "bad things" that seem to happen around her, which creates a weird disconnection between the narrative and the players' actions. The old main character (here "demoted" to a secondary, but playable character), is completely changed (to the worse) and what caused said changes is mentioned, but not shown to us (do I really need to utter the quote "show, don't tell"?). The effect is jarring, and seems forced, in order to move the story toward the planned point. The third playable character is just laughable, I seriously don't know what they had in mind when they added him. He should be an efficient assassin, and a zealot, yet it seems that just one line from another character is enough to change his mind over his life. He has killed many times before, is a cold blooded murderer and he is considered too religious even by his master, mind you. Characters from the previous chapter usually get a bad treatment, but I don't want to stress over this for every single one of them. I'll have one special mention for a character new to Dreamfall that seems to be in the game just to squeeze some emotional juices from us, yet it seems crass and calculated... Creepy girl. Her entire character seems to exist solely to make us feel sad, and it's not earned at all. To sum it up, everything is subpar in this game, with the sole exception of the graphics (it was actually a pretty good-looking game at the time, in my opinion). I wouldn't really recommend it, especially since it won't even give closure to the players, as the sequel looks far away, if it will ever get done. Buy it only if you are a die-hard fan of the prequel, and prepare to be sorely disappointed anyway. EDIT: The game did eventually get a sequel! I found it very disappointing, to be honest, but I haven't delved deeply into it, since I felt the story was weak like in Dreamfall, and at this point I don't care about the sequels as much. At the very least, you don't have to worry about the plot being so incomplete anymore, I guess.

Make no mistake: the story is fabulous, well-written and completely believable. Despite the short time that you spend with the characters, every moment that you have to go through their stories, you feel for them. They're realistic and have their own subtle flaws, not thrown in your face, which makes them all the more likeable. Gameplay-wise though, the game might have done better being a visual novel. As other reviews mentioned, stealth is sub-par, even laughable at times because it doesn't feel as though you're going to be caught out anyway, combat feels like a gimmick and is not even used effectively, and the environments offer too little to the gamer. Lastly of course, the ending. It's great in a sense, really riling you up to ask for more, but... the problem is, there ISN'T a sequel, even after 6 years. If there was a next game in the series this ending would surely have caused its sales to spike, but with none on the horizon, you aren't likely to like it. So - buy it if you're in games for the story, and can handle boring gameplay. Otherwise watch a walkthrough or something on YouTube - it might just make you like Dreamfall more.