Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

Doing this from memory: Story: Enjoyable mystery unfolding, immersive, imaginative, with significant milestones. Characters as good as in a good book: you'll grow attached. Art direction kept pace with a good imagination. Voice acting stellar for its time, like its predecessor. Graphics dated, but work with chosen stylization. Music was powerful, epic to moody, relevant, and suiting what's transpiring. Controls had glitches, but only a few times would you curse them out loud. Gameplay had some unintuitive parts, and an annoying bunch of grinding. Sometimes you'll scream with the overly lengthy dialogues, so just put subtitles on and when it gets too annoying, hit space bar to speed through the dialogues as fast as you can read them, or you may lose important content. I did need to look up a cheat one or two times when I got stuck. The 'your choices will have consequences' reminders seemed ominous, but I don't know if they did. Parts of when I'd get stuck would have me puzzling over it in the real world until I could get back and try something else: most of the time that worked (testament to the design). Combat: combat was some of the worst ever encountered, like there was no rhyme or reason, just insane button mashing. I did find certain patterns, but at most they might work 60% of the time, and forget combos. I tried with controllers & keyboard/mouse, default & custom mappings. Overall: If you enjoyed The Longest Journey (predecessor), you'll enjoy revisiting some of the places here in 3D, and continuing with the characters/story. I definitely suggest continuing with the sequel to this one too (Dreamfall Chapters). For a few months afterwards, I kept final savegames and revisited some locales again. Anytime a game leaves you with such long-term memories and feelings, as with a book, it's worthwhile. I still haven't sold my copy.

I'd give this 'game' no stars if I could...there's hardly any 'game' to play...95% of it is advancing through a story with a clunky interface at best. NOTHING from its 'prequel' is left - it doesn't deserve to be associated with TLJ at all. The only thing it has in common is the name of the character April Ryan. At BEST, this is a graphic novel with a hint of puzzle in it, and that's pushing it.

This game is a chore to play. The person is really difficult to control with a keyboard and mouse. I finally became fed up and just watched a play through. May be better on a different platform other than PC.

This game doesn't answer any of the (many) open questions of the prequel, mostly [spoiler!] why were the worlds united after all. There's a considerable time gap in the plot, which would be fine if the writers would have bothered to fill in the blanks regarding the (many) changes that occurred during that time. Apart from the incoherent story line, it also seems that the puzzle design is virtually nonexistent. Most puzzles are MGS wannabe avoidance puzzles, which are terribly clumsy and uninspired due to the game's amatueristic controls and joke of a fight mechanism. There wasn't a single aspect of this game which was not a total disappointment.

Oh, dear, how it was disappointing... I loved "The Longest Journey" and was extremely happy to learn about the sequel. But when I bought it and played, it all went downhill... The game is schizophrenic: switching between three playable characters, between fighting game (whose controls are still baffling to me), stealth (also with unpredictable rules) and classic adventure (talking, solving puzzles, collecting and using items) and between worlds doesn't really work. Characters are ugly, environments are dull (going from beautiful backgrounds in a point'n'click adventure to full 3D was a huge mistake) and plot doesn't make much sense. But the worst part is how the game ends. Or, actually, how it absolutely does not end at all. It just stops. And that's my reward for all the trouble I had with this game? No, thanks.