Dreamfall Chapters: The Final Cut

I just want to start by saying that if dreamfall chapters was advertised as an interactive movie I would have given it a 5. But it's not. It's advertised as an action adventure, or even a quest style adventure, which it is not. The world bast popsicle makes a great popsicle, but if you get it when you order cake you are likely to get upset. It's terrible as a cake, it Gots no dough of frosting, and it fills even worse since you were clearly decived. The good things about the game are as follows: The worst parts of dreamfall, combat and stealth, have been removed (these were only there to try and attract console audience, with no success). The bast parts of dreamfall, acting, charecters, story and world building, have been improves upon. Graphics has finally become what it should have been - many people praised dreamfall about its graphics, but that was just advertising hype. It had a good graphics angine, but no artists or budget to use it. In the end, 80% of the game had bland, empty enviorments. Based on book 1, Dreamfall Chapters seems to have fixed this. The bad things about the game are as follows: Puzzles are still at kindergarden level. The sad part is that puzzles were one of the things the game was advertised for. "In here, Zoe needed to enter this building or something, and she needes to get around the security robot" is what I recall from a game update. This was suppose to be a common thing - it is not. The game is still 95% walking and talking. Book 1 had only one multiple solution puzzle, which everyone solves immidietly through the talking option. It had 1 mediam difficulty puzzle (the torch + oil one), one easy plus puzzle (wordrobe) and like 10 obvios ones. Thats it. To replace puzzles, they added "walking dead" style "Choices". I hope these will turn out to be a saving grace, but I have seen choices like these before. Except in Witcher 2, did any choice in any game seemed to matter enough in retrospact? No. I'm bracing for disappointment.

I tried 3 times this year to re-install and add patches...it is simply a mess, every other game on GOG has run without complications, I'm done with this. Would rather replay LJ1 and LJ2 again anyway...

Seems like there are two different types of gamers out there - Those who are rightly hard to impress because they expect every box to be checked, and there's the hardcore adventure gamers who can give 16 bit games 5 stars because not every technical box needs to be checked. For the adventure gamers out there hardcore or otherwise, who just want to experience a cool atmospheric adventure game in a cool futuristic setting, this game is great. I would recommend playing at least Dreamfall first before playing this game since this is a direct sequel. As an occasional adventure gamer, I think the game is fun.

Great visuals, and a really great story, but not much gameplay wise (just like Dreamfall). It's basically a glorified walking simulator. And hey, that's fine. I was here for the conclusion of TLJ and Dreamfall, and the game does answer a few questions (and also adds a few more). But I still miss the puzzles from the first game. There is obviously a lot invested in this world (or worlds?), it's unique, and wonderfully weird. I just hope we get another game.

So this review is only based off the first book. If I can I may change my review after further books. I'm also going to avoid spoilers. So how is it? In a word bloody good and yes it really is worth two words. Story hasn't really begun to unfold in book one though there is definitely a good setup, plenty of interesting new characters and plenty of juicy intrigue to tie you over/torture you relentlessly untill book 2 come out. (don't know when, supposedly 2-3months but could be more) The story pretty much seems to start off where Dreamfall left off, though there do seem to be subtle changes. Also the answer to that one question everyone really wants to know is maybe or maybe not. Yeh still haven't fully cleared that up yet (in my opinion, others may interpret it differently) Voice acting is fantastic across the board with maybe one or two exceptions, that said the exceptions are mainly because I just personally didn't like their voices much, the actual acting still seemed pretty good. Writing is equally great and still contains that slightly sarcastic sense of humor from the previous two games. So why only 4 stars? Unfortunately gameplay is nothing to write home about. They seem to have dropped the stealth/fighting sections from Dreamfall (which is good) but it still seems to contain some of that bizarre adventure game logic that plagued The Longest Journey (though to a significantly lesser degree). This doesn't affect it too much though since, let's be honest, we're here for the story. The other problems are technical. I didn't run into and major bugs, just one invisible bin I think, but graphics (while very good) are very poorly optimized and have both aliasing issues and some lighting issues (because they're pushing the Unity engine to it's limits). On top of this I felt the audio mixing was a little off with some dialogue being a little hard to hear over the background noise. Overall though this is an absolutely great game, looking forward to the next book.