The Longest Journey

April, the main character, is witty and likeable. The story is Epic. The characters are intriguing, unique, and fun. The locations span from the dystopic high-tech and futuristic, to medieval fantasy, to mysterious and otherworldly. The dialogues are long, but well written, and they flesh out characters that lead full, interesting, lives. You'll meet friends, enemies and fun sidekicks during this epic journey, as you travel by magic, boat, metro, or more. If you enjoy this kind of classic point & click adventure game and haven't played this one, you might be missing out the best that the genre has to offer.

There is no question that The Longest Journey is ambitious. It is massive in length, and it's story spans a vast array of settings. The sheer number of animations, cutscenes, backgrounds, puzzles and lines of dialogue is staggering. Despite this, I can't say I enjoyed this game. The puzzles were poorly explained, and it was often impossible to know why you were doing things until they were done. It contains far too much filler dialogue. April, the main character, speaks almost exclusively in paragraphs, and not in sentences. And graphically, the game hasn't aged well. Let's start with the puzzles. This game commits almost every sin possible in adventure game design. Puzzles devolve into a long sequences, where the end outcome is frequently arbitrary. Sometimes there is no causality between action X and event Y, but you still must do X before Y occurs. For instance, at one stage in the game you must give a character a map to analyze, before a random pedestrian on the other side of the city drops a pizza box in a bin. It is almost on the same scale of implausibility as a butterfly flapping it's wings to cause a thunderstorm in China. And the game is full of these! Worse, is when you must repeat an action twice or more to do something. And the endless pixel hunts really drag. This is a great pity, as there are some genuinely well designed puzzles in this game, but they are the exception rather than the rule. When you compare the graphics of this game to the likes of Escape from Monkey Island, or Grim Fandango, it's plain to see they haven't aged nearly as well. Backgrounds lack consistent style and are sometimes poorly laid out to allow navigation. The 3D models are ugly, but I find this more acceptable considering the age of the game. However, I can't forgive the subpar animations the game is filled with. I can't count the number of times I sat waiting for an extremely slow animation to play out. And the speed of April's walking over those massive scenes, even when she was sprinting, was monotonous. okay to extremely bad. I can understand why the quality control on this was low, as there was a massive volume of dialogue and characters needing to be voiced. I especially despised the wise cracking side kick 'crow'. There is too much dialogue in this game. I know most adventure gamers love reading, and so do I. But I can only take so many overlong superfluous dialogue exchanges before my mind starts to wander. They could have halved almost every line spoken in this game, and not lost a thing. The story was okay. The variety of settings was interesting, the over arching epic plot was alright, but there were too many inconsequential subplots which could have been cut. Overall, I was fairly disappointed by this game. I'm a firm believer that less is more. If this was a quarter of it's current length, the production team could have spent much more time focusing on quality artwork, design and voice acting. Instead, they stretched the plot out too far, and the game suffered because of it.

TLDR: A great story that everyone who likes Adventure games should experience. Has a few minor shortcomings, but they're to be expected for a game of its age. The story is great! The world is beautifully made and I'd definitely love to get even more information on it, which is why I've bought all 3 games and I'm playing them in order. It doesn't get boring at any point and the mysteries aren't... ridiculous... like in many games. What you see is what you get and what you get is enjoyable. April also has quite the way to explain her current situation and her surroundings. The visuals are good enough for a game of that age. Unfortunately there are technical issues but nothing surmountable. The resolution is stuck to 640x480 and it's fullscreen or nothing. Thankfully, the game is alt-tab friendly, so the lack of window mode is not an issue. The backgrounds are prerendered so the quality and clarity thereof is good enough. Also there's no AA to speak of and the dialog boxes ("Are you sure you want to quit" etc, nothing to do with ingame dialogue) are white. Just press Y or N for the dialog and problem solved. The audio is fine. Definitely better than the visuals. The voice acting can be bad at times, as in old cartoon dub bad, meaning average, but most of the time it's fun and of good quality. Just don't expect modern triple-A voice acting. It wasn't possible at the time. The gameplay is good old point and click puzzle adventure. April does a great job explaining what you're looking at and the prerendered backgrounds are clear enough to prevent any need for pixel hunting. Not to mention that the puzzles do not require pixel hunting, or at least I remember none of that. As far as bugs and glitches go, the game only had one, which caused it to crash when getting to the Police Station. It was fixed by replacing a single file with one I found on the forums. All in all, considering when it was made, it's definitely a 5 star game. I'm cutting one because it's 2016.

Every now and then a game comes along that sucks you into its world so completely that you vanish into it for days at a time, surfacing only for food and sleep when you just physically can't play any longer. That was the story some 20 years ago, but the fact is that the game still holds up today. I am a tad troubled that the GOG version does not have Norwegian or Swedish audio since FunCom was a Norwegian company and the fact that it was released in Norwegian right from the start. In this context, it seems a tad odd that (while it contains more languages at least for the installer), only English and Polish is mentioned as languages on the page here. Yes, I am a registered owner, but have never installed this first, long deprecated 4-CD source as I have access to my DVD (originally first issued as a 2-CD version) with Norwegian, Swedish and English language which I play through ResidualVM: www.residualvm.org and have applied the HD mod by Faberman: tljhd.github.io/ No matter your language preference, I suggest you dig up a DVD or 2-CD edition and do it the same way...you won't regret it, I promise :)

After playing Myst, I caught "the puzzle fever" and played through Riven, Myst 3 and 4, and Obduction. I'm also trying RHEM, but I wanted to try a more story-rich puzzle game. The Longest Journey is critically acclaimed, so... Why not try it? The Good: - I like the main character, April Ryan. She's cheeky, funny, and believable. - The story is off to a strong start. I'd heard it was supposed to be complicated, but it seems quite straightforward and conventional at the moment. - The world designs are great and interesting. The Bad: Many of TLJ's puzzles don't make any sense until after they're revealed, assuming the solution makes sense at all. The Rubber Duck puzzle is, apparently, one of the most notorious amongst all games of this genre, frequently making "Top 10" lists of bad puzzles. Yes, it's that bad. How often players must look up a guide to finish a game tells you everything you need to know about it. I'm not the smartest person in the world, but I'm positive I'm not a dunce. I can proudly claim I can count on one hand the number of times I needed a small hint for Myst, Riven, Myst 3, and Obduction. I can't say the same for TLJ. I'm partway through chapter 3, and I'm quickly running out of patience due to how many times I've had to look up a full walkthrough. Extra: There is also a game-crashing glitch with the police station. GOG's known about it for years and it still hasn't been fixed! Unacceptable! There is a workaround, but you won't be able to figure out what it is for yourself, which is par for this course. Verdict: Don't play TLJ for its puzzles, so, you might as well not play it at all. I will finish TLJ because I paid for it (on sale) and I'm invested in the story. I doubt I will play it a second time or ever recommend it to anyone. You should probaly watch a "Lets Play" video instead. Reading guides to solve a game would be the same as watching someone else play it. So yeah, spend your money on food or gas instead.