The Longest Journey

This is a good game. The story line is good, characters are interesting, and most puzzles but a few solutions were dumb by my standards. It really falls on its face with the extensive walking through scenery to get to the next action point. Also there is a lot of back and forth to retrieve items, check dialog with other characters, etc. Thankfully you can speed travel but you can occasionally miss something that way.

Ragnar Tornquist, the gentleman who designed this game, is owed our thanks. It's not so much for the gameplay, which is simple and intuitive enough for anyone to play, but for the grand adventure he invites us to embark upon. A quick note: This game is a "take-your-time" kind of game. Patience and a joy for puzzle-solving come into play here. It may be an older game with dated graphics, but fortunately, the story trumps all. You are April Ryan, a brand-new student at an arts school who's been having some very strange, if visceral, dreams lately. As it turns out, those dreams are more than they seem to be as you begin having even stranger experiences occur in the waking world. While getting to know your friends and yourself, you begin to care about the characters, who are as deep and flawed as any human being. Unable to ignore the unusual happenings, you investigate and find yourself plunging ever deeper into a wondrous and mysterious reality. Along the way, you make friends, unforgettable enemies, encounter bizarre sights, learn startling revelations and uncover a dark conspiracy that will shatter the foundation of everything April Ryan ever knew and lived in. This game is as straightforward as it gets in terms of an adventure game. It's point-and-click and it doesn't really get much more simpler than that. The organization of inventory items is easy to access and utilize, especially since the pointer glows above objects of interests, so that eliminates pixel-hunting. You can skip through non-playable cutscenes, if you wish, but I highly recommend watching through them as some of them are critical to the story. It would be akin to skipping a couple of pages in a novel where a major turning point occurs. Dialog is smart and engaging, and it helps that the voice acting is superb. Subtitles, thankfully, are an option here and are extremely useful for people such as myself who are hard-of-hearing. The music is spectacular. It's evocative, grand, and instantly serves to set the mood. This game is an interactive novel, but what a novel! This is one adventure that literally lives up to its title. We're talking in excess of month's playing if a leisurely pace is taken. After you have beaten the game, I am certain you will feel a level of satisfaction that you've never felt with any other games. It is heartfelt, memorable, and a treasure to behold. It deserves to rank right up there alongside not only other adventure games (Grim Fandango comes to mind), but in all of gaming, period, if only for Mr. Tornquist's masterstroke as a storyteller. Now, dear friends, plunk down the money and treat yourself to a rich experience, you won't regret it.

For an adventure-game fan like myself, it was like coming home. The fact that it was created as recently as it was only emphasizes that feeling. Knowing that something like this exists out there makes me happier as a gamer. I would say it outstrips any adventure game that I know about in terms of the character-development of its protagonist. April exists on an entirely different level than near-caricatures that permeate other games. They bothered to give her her own psyche, which in my experience is a first. Plus, she's a female protagonist, which is somewhat rare in this genre, and in all games all-together, and the player will get the definite impression that she's not just there as a cheap ploy to appeal to male audiences. The story-line is intricate, though at times a bit too abstract. The villain of the game seems to be Chaos itself, which is at times a bit hard for them to pull off, but they do try so hard. I had the unfortunate feeling a few times during the game that I was just advancing game workflow, not actually striving for anything in particular. The game seems long, but you can breeze through it if you're not careful. The complexity of the puzzles is not particularly hard, unless you haven't yet picked up the item that you need. In that case, you will need to brute-force your way across the landscape figuring out puzzles that you've missed, hotspots that you didn't pick up on, conversations that you forgot to have, and items that you didn't know should combine together. In the case that you have everything you need, then it really is often just a matter of doing the first thing that makes sense. If nothing makes sense, why not just try every item in your inventory on every object in the room? Then again, this is a problem more with later games in the genre, rather than this game in particular. My two notable exceptions to this are the altar puzzle underwater, and the statue puzzle on the island. These required some real thinking, and I enjoyed those parts of the game most. The game is linear in the extreme, and this is where the game needed the most improvement I think. There is often one and only one valid thing that you can do in the world. Matching the right inventory items to the right object in the world frequently becomes like building a chain, one link at a time, from the beginning of the game to the end. A side-effect is that the things in the game that you're supposed to be doing (collect things from set A, collect things from set B, defeat bad guy #1, etc.) all happen incidentally if you know the "next right action" to take in the world. You will do your collecting of items without really ever thinking "I'm trying to find all the A's in the world". It just happens for you as a side-effect of advancing the game workflow. And toward the end of the game, you realize that the majority of the collectibles in the game are being quickly dumped in your lap anyway (I'm guessing that some elements of the story were removed, because in the span of about 10 minutes you collect roughly half to three-quarters of the collectibles). The game had a satisfactory ending, but then again considering its length it could have been a lot better. I found myself really wanting April to find her place somewhere in the course of the game, and that's one thing that never really happened, and I felt a bit disappointed. Despite my seemingly mostly negative commentary, I only complain out of love. Overall, I think the depth of the character was the one thing that this game really needed to get right, and there they succeeded marvelously.

This game may be 5* for others, it is only 3 for us. This isn't as much of a game as it is a "talk to everybody on Earth" simulator. At chapter 4/12 it felt like we've been playing for an eternity already. Old-fashioned, you might say. And that's true - and it should not be a problem (and maybe we are just too impatient). But it takes so much time to finally do something apart from talking, and then the solutions to some problems turn out to be pretty wild considering how much trudging along you have to endure if you don't have a brilliant hunch. The interface does not lessen the frustration-factor either. In this version we have played It takes about 6 clicks on an object till you get the "look-use-talk" tool, and if you look at anything, it will take another 6 more clicks to try and use it. Maybe we will give it another chance later, but it's very unlikely at mom. Unfortunate. Could be a good little game if it was not this time-consuming.

If there is any genre that has best captured the spirit of storytelling, it's the point and click adventure. The Longest Journey is certainly no exception. The Longest Journey seems to be aimed at those who grew up playing Lucasarts and Sierra adventures and wanted something a bit more mature. This is reflected in the realistic characters April meets and the uncompromising worlds she visits. The story The Longest Journey tells is of a world divided. Magic and science have proven too incompatible to inhabit the same plane of existence. April has to shift between two Earths that have been separated by The Balance in order to try and help restore that balance... Before it's too late. Great storyline, interesting, well voiced characters, imaginative locations and the its fair share of puzzles all help to make The Longest Journey one of the best, if not the best adventure game ever made. The only detractions are the lack of anti-aliasing and dodgy modelling on a couple of the less important characters. Those minor detractions aside, I have no hesitation in giving this five stars.