The Longest Journey

A must play. Metacritic cannot lie, can it? ;)

Absolute best adventure game ever. Period.

I gave this game multiple chances, even in different languages. The furthest I could get was the second visit to the second world (or so). While still on Stark, I was looking forwards to what it was going to evolve into. What stopped me: - Incredibly puerile story. Some total garbage about "restoring the balance". It feels like the worst stereotypical kind of fantasy-nerd-fantasy. I liked it up until the point when it expected me to take that shit seriously. And they just talk on and on and on... And there's no humor, no self-awareness. I would NEVER liken this to Lucasarts or Sierra in that way. It's what we call self-indulgent, bred from first-world ennui. I'm not surprised it's Swedish. - Some puzzles kind of difficult to guess at (to say the least). It looks great. I guess it has a nice soundtrack. I think I've said my lot.

You will have to jump through hoops to get this working on Windows 11. It does not work out of the box. At a minimum, you will need to run it in administrator mode. Once you do get it working, you'll find that the game is terrible. The story is self-serious. It's progressive in some ways, painfully dated in others, and riddled with boring monologues and cliches. There are nuggets of something good buried in hours of dullness. Oh, and it does that thing you usually see in bad anime where your character is offended when sex is brought up, but it sure gets brought up a lot. The gameplay is actually miserable. Unless you have infinite patience and are willing to spend it here, you will be using a guide for most of it. It's trial-and-error most of the time, and other times it's intentionally wasting your time. There will be hours-long stretches where you don't solve a single puzzle, then there will be a massive puzzle that requires you to combine three items in the most illogical way. Pacing, puzzles, and dialog are all awful. There's so much good media in the world. Don't waste your time here.

This game is very difficult to get working on a modern version of Windows. The process necessary to make it work are pretty complicated. It turned out to be not worth my time. I think gog.com should have a feature that warns you when a game is unlikely to work "out of the box" with default settings.