The Longest Journey

For an adventure-game fan like myself, it was like coming home. The fact that it was created as recently as it was only emphasizes that feeling. Knowing that something like this exists out there makes me happier as a gamer. I would say it outstrips any adventure game that I know about in terms of the character-development of its protagonist. April exists on an entirely different level than near-caricatures that permeate other games. They bothered to give her her own psyche, which in my experience is a first. Plus, she's a female protagonist, which is somewhat rare in this genre, and in all games all-together, and the player will get the definite impression that she's not just there as a cheap ploy to appeal to male audiences. The story-line is intricate, though at times a bit too abstract. The villain of the game seems to be Chaos itself, which is at times a bit hard for them to pull off, but they do try so hard. I had the unfortunate feeling a few times during the game that I was just advancing game workflow, not actually striving for anything in particular. The game seems long, but you can breeze through it if you're not careful. The complexity of the puzzles is not particularly hard, unless you haven't yet picked up the item that you need. In that case, you will need to brute-force your way across the landscape figuring out puzzles that you've missed, hotspots that you didn't pick up on, conversations that you forgot to have, and items that you didn't know should combine together. In the case that you have everything you need, then it really is often just a matter of doing the first thing that makes sense. If nothing makes sense, why not just try every item in your inventory on every object in the room? Then again, this is a problem more with later games in the genre, rather than this game in particular. My two notable exceptions to this are the altar puzzle underwater, and the statue puzzle on the island. These required some real thinking, and I enjoyed those parts of the game most. The game is linear in the extreme, and this is where the game needed the most improvement I think. There is often one and only one valid thing that you can do in the world. Matching the right inventory items to the right object in the world frequently becomes like building a chain, one link at a time, from the beginning of the game to the end. A side-effect is that the things in the game that you're supposed to be doing (collect things from set A, collect things from set B, defeat bad guy #1, etc.) all happen incidentally if you know the "next right action" to take in the world. You will do your collecting of items without really ever thinking "I'm trying to find all the A's in the world". It just happens for you as a side-effect of advancing the game workflow. And toward the end of the game, you realize that the majority of the collectibles in the game are being quickly dumped in your lap anyway (I'm guessing that some elements of the story were removed, because in the span of about 10 minutes you collect roughly half to three-quarters of the collectibles). The game had a satisfactory ending, but then again considering its length it could have been a lot better. I found myself really wanting April to find her place somewhere in the course of the game, and that's one thing that never really happened, and I felt a bit disappointed. Despite my seemingly mostly negative commentary, I only complain out of love. Overall, I think the depth of the character was the one thing that this game really needed to get right, and there they succeeded marvelously.

This game may be 5* for others, it is only 3 for us. This isn't as much of a game as it is a "talk to everybody on Earth" simulator. At chapter 4/12 it felt like we've been playing for an eternity already. Old-fashioned, you might say. And that's true - and it should not be a problem (and maybe we are just too impatient). But it takes so much time to finally do something apart from talking, and then the solutions to some problems turn out to be pretty wild considering how much trudging along you have to endure if you don't have a brilliant hunch. The interface does not lessen the frustration-factor either. In this version we have played It takes about 6 clicks on an object till you get the "look-use-talk" tool, and if you look at anything, it will take another 6 more clicks to try and use it. Maybe we will give it another chance later, but it's very unlikely at mom. Unfortunate. Could be a good little game if it was not this time-consuming.

If there is any genre that has best captured the spirit of storytelling, it's the point and click adventure. The Longest Journey is certainly no exception. The Longest Journey seems to be aimed at those who grew up playing Lucasarts and Sierra adventures and wanted something a bit more mature. This is reflected in the realistic characters April meets and the uncompromising worlds she visits. The story The Longest Journey tells is of a world divided. Magic and science have proven too incompatible to inhabit the same plane of existence. April has to shift between two Earths that have been separated by The Balance in order to try and help restore that balance... Before it's too late. Great storyline, interesting, well voiced characters, imaginative locations and the its fair share of puzzles all help to make The Longest Journey one of the best, if not the best adventure game ever made. The only detractions are the lack of anti-aliasing and dodgy modelling on a couple of the less important characters. Those minor detractions aside, I have no hesitation in giving this five stars.

The game is advertised as an adventure in two world, one governed by science, one by magic. This intrigued me so much, I had to give it a try. Big mistake. First of all, the game is beautiful to look at. It better be, because you'll be looking at the same things, over and over and over and over......the game is not a test of your logic and reasoning skills, it's a test of eyesight and patience. Items that are completely essential to progress in the game can only be found by randomly stumbling around a room, again and again until you get lucky. You can't use your brain and find a key in a logical place, you have to pick up every single item on the coffee table until picking up the magazine reveals the key underneath. Now, a little of this is okay, but the game really overdoes it. You have to have the patience of a saint to endure this game, which makes you run from one end of the map to get something, only to send you right back where you started to get something else. I don't call that fun. I call that boredom and frustration. Horrible, horrible game.

Incredible story, music, voice-acting, and characters that stay with you long after you complete the game. If you like story-driven point-and-click RPGs, this game's for you.