The Longest Journey

It's 2016. I just finished playing "The Longest Journey" for the first time. And this game is amazing. I played adventurers from time to time, over my gaming life, never was and avid fan of them still. But this game... it's like reading a good book, really. The characters ARE alive, sure, sometimes they're sketchy, but most of the time — quite interesting. Authors aren't afraid to give them lengthy dialogues, unlike short phrases, that seem to be the standart for today's adventurers. Sure, the graphics in movies are not aged well, and there is no widescreen support, but that aside from that game is still looking quite nice, and have some cool music and very well spoken dialogues. The length of the game was quite a nice surprise too, it took me 20+ hours to finish. Puzzles are okay-ish, there was a few hard cases, but overall they are logical, and nice. Still, the story is definitely strongest suit. It was a pleasure playing this jewel. I will remember it.

There are so many things wrong with this game. It's super buggy. Many of the "puzzles" in this game relate to, "how can I get past this scene without the game crashing on me?" The game doesn't have a very friendly start, where you have to invest a few hours before you really start caring about characters, and understand what is going on. Many of the puzzles aren't the greatest, including a handful of, "Figure something out without any explanation because hey, its here!" And I still have to give this game 5 stars. It's just that good. I took a few days after completing the game to review it, to see how my opinion would change. It only got better. I guess there's two kinds of adventure gamers in the world: "The plot should drive the puzzles" folks and "The puzzles should drive the plot." If you're a puzzle person, you might find this game a bit overrated. If you're a story person, you'll fall in love with this game. I sure did.

Helpful Tips: (game Review follows below) ----------------- 1) SPEEDING UP GAME: April can move at a glacial pace sometimes: you can double click to have April Jog across the screen, this will work on any action she performs. At some point you may even want to take advantage of the ESCAPE button which skips alot of the tedious animations or repeat conversations. When you're solving puzzles you'll have to sometimes go between several locations several times, across several screens back and forth, skipping walking animations will reduce the tedium considerably. 2) CONTROL SCHEME: ESCAPE: Exit/Skip I: Inventory X: Toggle Exit Points P: Pause R-Click Cancel Action. A / S : Quick Select Enter/Arrows: Select conversation dialogue. 3) STEAM CONTROLLER PROFILE: steam://controllerconfig/413080/582144026 (Install as a Desktop Config, save your default one before doing so) 4) VISUALS: Personally, I got rid of full screen by editing preference.ini and setting bool_StartFullscreen=0 as the full screen resulted in a cropped image which was making some puzzles undoable. I also set my monitor res to 800x600 since the no FS window is going to be really tiny. I had characters that were basically missing half their textures and resolved that by unselecting hardware acceleration during launch. REVIEW: ------------- I've been putting off playing this game for years, every since Dreamfall chapters came out and I wanted to start the series at the very beginning. I'm very sensitive to visuals and wasn't sure if I could get through this game and yes, the visuals were heavily dated but the game more than made up for it with its beautifully imagined story/lore/universe with voice acting by far superior to anything that the triple-AH studios put out these days. If you can get passed the visuals there is a deeply rewarding experience waiting for you in a universe that has both a Cyberpunk distopia and a fantasy realm co-existing with conspiracies and intrigues that span across both.

Here's my spoiler-free review: PROS: 1) Epic Production. There are many different worlds to explore and each section of the game has its own unique feel. There are, accordingly, many characters to converse with in these worlds, with (mostly) good voice acting. You'll probably forget about the paltry 640x480 resolution before long, and besides, the pre-rendered cinematics are quite beautiful.* 2) Engaging story. The lead, April Ryan, is funny and believable. Her friends and companions along the way are well developed. The mystery of what is going on with April is established well, and then slowly revealed throughout the game in such a way that suspense is maintained. Extra star for the ending, which was very good. CONS: The game really started to feel like a chore about half way through. I persevered because I wanted to see how it would conclude, but a lot of it was just not that much fun. I blame two things: 1) Conversation. It's good to have a lot of character interaction. It's not good when the voice-acted dialogue drags on and on and on, and you find yourself click click clicking, thinking to yourself *just get on with it already please!" It wasn't much of an issue for April and her friends, but with the secondary characters it started to become drudgery. 2) Puzzles/Gameplay. There are a bunch of pretty good puzzles, and even a few excellent ones. There are only one or two puzzles that I consider *bad* (the solution didn't seem intuitive at all). Bad puzzles aren't the problem though; it's the vast number of merely decent puzzles. It wouldn't have mattered as much except that I didn't have any choice in where the game was taking me. It became a click-a-thon to see what would happen next, instead of giving me a chance to make a difference for April. - - - *It IS possible to force a higher screen resolution using a special utility to intercept the game's DirectX calls (I used 'dgVoodoo2'). And wow the game looks great this way. But it's a lot of extra work.

It's obvious this game was made with a lot of love and care, but it is also pretty flawed. The game is light on puzzles overall, and those that are there are often obvious or uninteresting. The world of the game and the scope of its plot are huge - way too much so to fit in this game. The exposition at one point becomes laughably excessive and convoluted. There are about a dozen MacGuffins more than the plot really needs, and the sheer convenience needed for the main character to be able to round them all up is staggering. There are many areas that show promise but ultimately fail to deliver. Take the theme of two worlds, one magic and one technological. In a point-and-click adventure, you'd assume that a big part would be using items acquired in one realm in the other - there are only a couple such moments that I can remember, one being clever (the magnet) and one completely nonsensical (the calculator). The characters are pretty good. April feels earnest, and she often offers lampshading on the absurdity of her situation and the sequence of events, which doesn't excuse the poorly constructed plot but at least makes it more bearable. I can totally see why people would love this game, but I feel the world and its characters would be better used as the setting for an RPG or something. Either that, or you keep the world in the background and make a more focused game. Here, they had made this well fleshed out world, and they really wanted to make use of it, writing a very grand story which couldn't really be fit into just one adventure game. I should mention that I played the game with the Swedish translation (which I think isn't available here). That was probably a mistake, since the game, despite being Norwegian, seems to be written for English.