Awkward telltale-style/item hunting game
Dreamfall Chapters is a continuation of Dreamfall, a game that left its players hanging halfway through its unfinished story almost a decade ago. Chapters continues this story as a combination of telltale-style interactive movie and traditional point-and-click adventure gaming.
To start with the interactive movie elements: The scenes in this game rely heavily on dialogue, and that dialogue tends to be longwinded, stilted and not always very interesting, with an over-reliance on quirky characterization and an exaggerated supposedly-humorous awkwardness between characters. When no-one is talking the pacing remains simply terrible, with even action scenes having all the urgency of a Miss Marple novel. The actual choices the player gets to make fare a little better; most of them seem of actual importance in the moment they are made and the options are reasonable with respect to the character making them, as voiced by his or her internal monologue. Even better, a fair number of choices actually do affect future events, leading to different outcomes and scenes.
Between interactive cutscenes, Chapters is an adventure game where the protagonist gets to wander various locations looking for the right object or person to interact with or correct item to pick up in order to overcome some sort of obstacle. There are a number of low-key puzzle elements here too, but most of the time the main challenge is simply finding what you need followed by trial-and-error attempts to combine objects in the inventory and/or the environment. The environments themselves vary in visual quality, some featuring genuinely interesting design while many others are dull, dull, dull. The two largest areas also see very heavy re-use.
All in all, the adventure part of the game takes up about three quarters of gameplay and a fair chunk of it feels a little uninspired, a chore done for the reward of more story development rather than because it is a fun activity on its own.
Lastly, the overall story. The game switches frequently between three protagonists, which tends to interrupt the flow and sometimes makes their situations hard to keep track of. Also, for most of the game the player is left with next to no knowledge of what is actually going on, then towards the end gets bombarded with exposition as the game in detail and at length spells out all the secret important plotstuff that has been going on since the start of Dreamfall. Dreamfall Chapters would have benefitted from a more gradual discovery of these important facts; instead most of the protagonist's efforts focus on small problems that are largely irrelevant to the game's intricate cosmology and the objectives of the antagonists.
The bottom line is that, while the game does have some charm and (partially unrealised) potential, I cannot recommend it.
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