The Longest Journey

Easily one of the best point-and-click adventure games. I finished it about one month ago and was very impressed. Yes, I missed this game when it came out for some reason. Great story, interesting characters, clever puzzles. I can't say anything bad about this game. For all those people who can't make it work on Windows 10: It's fully supported by the most recent nightly builds of ResidualVM (that's how I played it).

I wish a remake of this jewel was released. With up to date resolution at least. The design of locations and characters deserves to be exposed in hiresed details. It is just my wish. The original game still is a masterpiece of the genre.

The Longest Journey hat viel von einem guten Adventure, eine gute Story, interessante Charkatere usw. Leider mangelt es den Rätseln an Zahl und Qualität. Zudem ist der Port schlicht und ergreifend nicht gut, so fehlen zum Beispiel viele Lokalisierungen, obwohl es sie damals schon gab, das Spiel ist nicht über Galaxy zu starten und man hadert mit diversen Programmabstürzen.

I got sucked into this because of the premise: two worlds, one ruled by magic, one by science. I've always been fascinated by that idea. Unfortunately, the pace of the game was glacial. Game play consisted of tests of endurance and eyesight. You'd need a certain key, for example. Run across town, discover it is not there, and have to run, literally miles, back to where you started. To get a clue. Run back across town. Get sent, AGAIN, back to exactly where you started. This is where the key is. After an hour of randomly bashing around the room, you uncover it beneath a magazine sitting on a table, which previously couldn't be moved. Yes, the graphics were pretty, but this game was like getting slowly beaten to death. CRUSHINGLY boring. Game designers just don't get it: frustration does not equal fun. Clever puzzles can be interesting, but a lot of this was just brute-force "try everything until something works". Negative five stars.

I want to warn those who, like me, were taken in by the pretty images and fascinating concept. The concept *is* fascinating... and the terrible writing utterly ruined it. Don't get me wrong, it's playable, certainly. And if you're good at looking past horrible writing and delivery, the concept still *is* very good. But the writing makes me cringe and the foreshadowing is useless. So far there is only a single major development I did not see coming at least two chapters before it was 'revealed', though I'm also still a few chapters from finishing. The one I didn't see coming was only because it had been said outright at the beginning, but in such a way that made it seem figurative when it was actually literal. Especially if you're a writer like me, pass this by. The way such a wonderful and fascinating story has been taken and so thoroughly made mediocre, boring and painfully written will just leave you bitter and disillusioned a mere few chapters in.