The Longest Journey

I've never been big into adventure games outside of the wonderful Myst titles because I find most adventure games to be confusing from the get-go and thus fundamentally flawed. But I picked this one up because I'm a big fan of science fiction/fantasy and it had stellar reviews. Oops! First I want to say what I liked about this game: The environments are quite imaginative and beautiful. Some of the dialogue is quite amusing, and the story was probably pretty interesting for it's time. The main character is cute and likable. But I can't even keep a straight face on those points because of how two-sided they are, like everything else in The Longest Journey. The backgrounds, as finely rendered as they are, feel cartoony and illogical in their layout and artistic design. The characters that inhabit this world do not match the crispness of their surroundings; everyone is a low-res, polygonal mess, especially the main character, who looks like she was rendered in software mode while everything else went full-3d. Most of the dialogue is ridiculous and slapstick and the main character's words are often obnoxious, sarcastic or just plain stupid. I had a hard time caring about her survival or mental stability because of how uninvolving she was. Everything is a cutesy observation or pop-culture remark. And the main story? What main story? I wandered around for hours in this game, in and out of buildings and cities and entire dimensions, piecing together insipid, frustrating and unintuitive puzzles before someone bothered to explain to me what was going on. Where's the urgency? And that sort of sums up my main beef with TLG: it can't decide whether it's a serious game or seriously tongue-in-cheek. Everything in the game-world looks kiddish, there are talking trees and dragons popping out of paintings, but on the other hand your neighbor wants to rape you, corporate CEOs are involved in satanic conspiracies and a guy in a wheelchair will only relinquish a vital puzzle item in exchange for information on your virginity. I'm not kidding. That's about the time I stopped caring about The Longest Journey and just gave up. *And why was Tuvok from Voyager in the police station? What?) Where's my motivation? And the puzzles in this game are the worst. I had to consult a walkthrough for almost each one because THEY DON'T MAKE ANY SENSE. Note to game designers: give your player a reason to jump through hoops or else they'll just hate you and give up. I need a clearly defined goal to work back from in order to care about a multiple-part puzzle or else I'm just pissing into the wind. The worst one I can remember was getting a ring from some electrified subway tracks by creating some stupid contraption using a deflated rubber ducky, a stick, a gum wrapper and some PVC piping. I had to recover these items from opposite ends of the available game-world. This was extremely annoying because I had no motivation to gather or retrieve these items; what was I working for? Why should I care? Why fish objects out of a rotten sewer when I could just make a phone-call and have a professional technician come out and do it all for me? Some of the puzzles involve other people, and getting certain reactions out of them. These are even worse than the "invention" puzzles because, like the rest of the puzzles, they make no sense. Human-interaction puzzles in any game are thin ice because not everyone reacts to certain situations the same way, but the game makes you handle a social situation a certain way and this automatically alienates and uninvolves any player who would have reacted differently. 99% of the time I didn't know what I was trying to solve until I'd solved it. And it didn't help that the human reactions are slapstick and completely implausible. This would have been fine if it were a decidedly children's game-- most of the puzzles might get a pass as lessons in abstract ingenuity-- but I reiterate, we're dealing with themes of corporate corruption, rape and virginity. Kids need not apply. The Longest Journey tested my patience, but not in a good way. The puzzles are long-winded and seemingly arbitrary and the game-world can't decide whether it's serious or kiddy-friendly, a contrast that distracted me the entire time, like a bug under my skin I just couldn't itch. Play the Myst games instead. At least those games know what they are and play off of those consistent themes, the puzzles and gorgeous imagery being based on the uniqueness of whatever world you're visiting at that moment. The Longest Journey is more interested in taking your virginity for spare parts.

Pretty aged graphics and controls. Looks like a good story game, but I gave up clicking every object in a low reso polygon world.

Truly terrible writing, (I'm a writer and it's the one thing I can't deal with in a game), one of the slowest moving stories ever, clunky controls and a boring and annoying main character make this game an enormous disappointment for me. Particularly with all these weird '5 star' ratings, which this game definitely does not deserve.

Look, the late 90s was a bad time for adventure games. The genre had petered out when Lucasarts stopped making them, and Sierra crashed after trying to go 3D. What I'm saying is that when people call this game a "classic", it's only because the genre was effectively dead at the time of release and there was nothing else for adventure fans. But really this game was a mess. You play the whiniest, wordiest college student who never shuts up, talking to NPCs who never shut up, bouncing back and forth between a generic Blade Runner world to a generic fantasy world, solving the most ridiculous puzzles that involve nonsense logic with tons of walking all over huge environments wondering if some arbitrary event triggered a completely unrelated event on the other side of a city. One puzzle in particular stands out. You must enter a closed theater to talk to someone inside. The sequence of events that follows (all so you can distract the janitor to slip inside) is so ludicrous and convoluted, that I would put it up there on the same level as the infamous Gabriel Knight 3 "cat mustache" puzzle. Just go look up the solution to that one puzzle, and you can see for yourself how ridiculous the puzzle logic is. Give a bottle of dirty dishwater to a dying man in the desert, and he'll say it's the best water he's ever had. So too was the response of thirsty adventure fans in the year 2000 when they were offered The Longest Journey.

i hate to be the sole voice of dissent, but i believe it needs to be said that while longest journey does indeed have one of the most engaging stories ive seen told in a game format, as a game itself, it exemplifies the very worst of adventure games in most every way. the absolutely *painful* pixel hunting and nonsensical trial-and-error puzzles that are utterly disconnected from anything even resembling a reasonable connection to the story make the name "longest journey" absolutely apt. take my advice: buy the game for the storyline, and while it downloads grab a complete walkthrough, and USE it. enjoy the story, and skip the hair-pulling frustration and "oh my god are you kidding me what the heck did that have to do with ANYthing??" moments... or even better, just skip the game entirely, and watch a walkthrough on youtube to enjoy the story in a way that better suits it: non-interactively. then go buy the sequel, "dreamfall," which actually deserves all the praised heaped upon it.