The Longest Journey

Played it several times, always quite apart to re-discover the amazing journey and mixture of Science-Fiction and Fantasy. You can pretty easily call this game Cyberpunk and fantastical journey, this game is so unique and fascinating. Your fun might be spoiled, however, by 2 major things that were quite unfortunate, when I was reminded about: Performence and black-cut-scenes (no movies at all on windows 10 and so I have heard 11 too), I was ableto fix it by using SCUMM-VM, this software has saved so many old games at the same time slightly enhancing the graphics. The second is a few bugs that are game-breaking - I have stumbled across situation where assembling in wrong order certain 'Metro-fishing' device can cause that you can't progress, so save before combining clampers with anything. So why still 5 stars? The journey is so long, interesting, perhaps more like actually role playing so you visit bar each day to see different people and see different events each day, there is some sort of natural progress and discovery while puzzles are reasonable enough if you follow what everyone is saying (although dialog-log is not great).

It has a storyline and characters that have stayed with me more than a decade after I completed it. I can still hear April Ryan's voice (the main character that you play) as I journeyed through this amazing adventure, hearing her thoughts on everything, and experiencing everything. I love it.

It's 2016. I just finished playing "The Longest Journey" for the first time. And this game is amazing. I played adventurers from time to time, over my gaming life, never was and avid fan of them still. But this game... it's like reading a good book, really. The characters ARE alive, sure, sometimes they're sketchy, but most of the time — quite interesting. Authors aren't afraid to give them lengthy dialogues, unlike short phrases, that seem to be the standart for today's adventurers. Sure, the graphics in movies are not aged well, and there is no widescreen support, but that aside from that game is still looking quite nice, and have some cool music and very well spoken dialogues. The length of the game was quite a nice surprise too, it took me 20+ hours to finish. Puzzles are okay-ish, there was a few hard cases, but overall they are logical, and nice. Still, the story is definitely strongest suit. It was a pleasure playing this jewel. I will remember it.

There are so many things wrong with this game. It's super buggy. Many of the "puzzles" in this game relate to, "how can I get past this scene without the game crashing on me?" The game doesn't have a very friendly start, where you have to invest a few hours before you really start caring about characters, and understand what is going on. Many of the puzzles aren't the greatest, including a handful of, "Figure something out without any explanation because hey, its here!" And I still have to give this game 5 stars. It's just that good. I took a few days after completing the game to review it, to see how my opinion would change. It only got better. I guess there's two kinds of adventure gamers in the world: "The plot should drive the puzzles" folks and "The puzzles should drive the plot." If you're a puzzle person, you might find this game a bit overrated. If you're a story person, you'll fall in love with this game. I sure did.

Helpful Tips: (game Review follows below) ----------------- 1) SPEEDING UP GAME: April can move at a glacial pace sometimes: you can double click to have April Jog across the screen, this will work on any action she performs. At some point you may even want to take advantage of the ESCAPE button which skips alot of the tedious animations or repeat conversations. When you're solving puzzles you'll have to sometimes go between several locations several times, across several screens back and forth, skipping walking animations will reduce the tedium considerably. 2) CONTROL SCHEME: ESCAPE: Exit/Skip I: Inventory X: Toggle Exit Points P: Pause R-Click Cancel Action. A / S : Quick Select Enter/Arrows: Select conversation dialogue. 3) STEAM CONTROLLER PROFILE: steam://controllerconfig/413080/582144026 (Install as a Desktop Config, save your default one before doing so) 4) VISUALS: Personally, I got rid of full screen by editing preference.ini and setting bool_StartFullscreen=0 as the full screen resulted in a cropped image which was making some puzzles undoable. I also set my monitor res to 800x600 since the no FS window is going to be really tiny. I had characters that were basically missing half their textures and resolved that by unselecting hardware acceleration during launch. REVIEW: ------------- I've been putting off playing this game for years, every since Dreamfall chapters came out and I wanted to start the series at the very beginning. I'm very sensitive to visuals and wasn't sure if I could get through this game and yes, the visuals were heavily dated but the game more than made up for it with its beautifully imagined story/lore/universe with voice acting by far superior to anything that the triple-AH studios put out these days. If you can get passed the visuals there is a deeply rewarding experience waiting for you in a universe that has both a Cyberpunk distopia and a fantasy realm co-existing with conspiracies and intrigues that span across both.