The Longest Journey

I wish a remake of this jewel was released. With up to date resolution at least. The design of locations and characters deserves to be exposed in hiresed details. It is just my wish. The original game still is a masterpiece of the genre.

I got sucked into this because of the premise: two worlds, one ruled by magic, one by science. I've always been fascinated by that idea. Unfortunately, the pace of the game was glacial. Game play consisted of tests of endurance and eyesight. You'd need a certain key, for example. Run across town, discover it is not there, and have to run, literally miles, back to where you started. To get a clue. Run back across town. Get sent, AGAIN, back to exactly where you started. This is where the key is. After an hour of randomly bashing around the room, you uncover it beneath a magazine sitting on a table, which previously couldn't be moved. Yes, the graphics were pretty, but this game was like getting slowly beaten to death. CRUSHINGLY boring. Game designers just don't get it: frustration does not equal fun. Clever puzzles can be interesting, but a lot of this was just brute-force "try everything until something works". Negative five stars.

I want to warn those who, like me, were taken in by the pretty images and fascinating concept. The concept *is* fascinating... and the terrible writing utterly ruined it. Don't get me wrong, it's playable, certainly. And if you're good at looking past horrible writing and delivery, the concept still *is* very good. But the writing makes me cringe and the foreshadowing is useless. So far there is only a single major development I did not see coming at least two chapters before it was 'revealed', though I'm also still a few chapters from finishing. The one I didn't see coming was only because it had been said outright at the beginning, but in such a way that made it seem figurative when it was actually literal. Especially if you're a writer like me, pass this by. The way such a wonderful and fascinating story has been taken and so thoroughly made mediocre, boring and painfully written will just leave you bitter and disillusioned a mere few chapters in.

Played it several times, always quite apart to re-discover the amazing journey and mixture of Science-Fiction and Fantasy. You can pretty easily call this game Cyberpunk and fantastical journey, this game is so unique and fascinating. Your fun might be spoiled, however, by 2 major things that were quite unfortunate, when I was reminded about: Performence and black-cut-scenes (no movies at all on windows 10 and so I have heard 11 too), I was ableto fix it by using SCUMM-VM, this software has saved so many old games at the same time slightly enhancing the graphics. The second is a few bugs that are game-breaking - I have stumbled across situation where assembling in wrong order certain 'Metro-fishing' device can cause that you can't progress, so save before combining clampers with anything. So why still 5 stars? The journey is so long, interesting, perhaps more like actually role playing so you visit bar each day to see different people and see different events each day, there is some sort of natural progress and discovery while puzzles are reasonable enough if you follow what everyone is saying (although dialog-log is not great).

It has a storyline and characters that have stayed with me more than a decade after I completed it. I can still hear April Ryan's voice (the main character that you play) as I journeyed through this amazing adventure, hearing her thoughts on everything, and experiencing everything. I love it.