Posted February 24, 2010
I was one of those people who came into this game on the back of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Dreamfall, released back in 2006 managed to combine oldschool point-and-click adventuring with some incredibly pointless fight scenes that were clearly designed to appeal to the XBox crowd, but the story itself was actually immersive, albeit short and more hole-ridden than Swiss cheese. After finishing it in a paltry couple of days on PC I started learning more about its predecessor, The Longest Journey, but couldn't track down a copy anywhere, until I was directed here.
The premise didn't really seem that promising at first. You take on the role of April Ryan, an art student with a sense of humour drier than the Sahara desert, who's been experiencing strange nightmares and who quickly finds herself embroiled in a battle between two rival factions across two worlds - Stark (23rd century Earth) and Arcadia (erm... a different Earth with magic and talking birds), as well as finding the ability to "shift" between these two worlds. I'm not going to go much further into the story here because it's something you really need to experience for yourself. Suffice to say, the story is far more involved than Dreamfall's
After putting up with Zoe Castillo's emo whinings in Dreamfall, I wasn't really keen on going through that all over again. Thankfully, April's persona is actually likeable and the scriptwriters did a great job here, successfully carrying her emotions through to a level that actually has you sympathising with her, rather than having you simply dismissing her as some spoilt, whiny rich kid, mainly because she's none of those things. Sadly, the other characters you interact with tend to border on the two-dimensional, even her close friends. You don't tend to learn much about them despite all the available dialogue options, and you quickly come to realise that they don't play that big a role in the main story anyway, especially after chapter 4.
Where TLJ shines however is with its humour. Some commentators here and elsewhere have said that the game tries too hard to be funny, or that the game is sarcasm overkill. I disagree. The sarcasm is a product of the time - this game was released in 1999, and who wasn't sarcastic back then? While the first characters you meet have a mix of American/South American and British accents, the humour is firmly British, which is intriguing considering that the developers of this game are Norwegian. There are a lot of genuine laugh out loud moments, and I haven't found myself laughing this hard at an adventure game since Monkey Island 2.
But then this is a genuine point-and-click adventure game. It's a proper old school game of pixel-hunting and solving puzzles, but this is one area where I do find myself agreeing with some of the other commentators: Some puzzles simply don't make any sense. Case in point: You have a police officer guaring a crashed hovership who's choking on dust. April has, in her possession a can of cola. Now, logic would dictate that you would give that can of cola to the police officer who would drink the stuff and then have the sudden urge run off to the toilet or something leaving the place unguarded, but no. Apparently, the correct approach is to take that can of cola, travel on the subway to the docks, use the paint mixing machine on it to shake it up, run back to the crash scene in record time before the can explodes and THEN offer it to the police officer who promptly soaks himself in the stuff. To quote the Angry Video Game Nerd: WHO WOULD KNOW THAT? Now I've been playing point-and-click adventures for years, right back to Maniac Mansion on Amiga, and even text adventures on hardware probably older than your mother (ever heard of the ZX Spectrum?), but I've never seen logic fail like this before, and I've never had to resort to walkthroughs (heh, try finding a walkthrough in 1987) either, but TLJ had me heading over to GameFAQs out of frustration.
The graphics haven't aged particularly well. Whilst the 2D backdrops are gorgeous, the 3D models are ugly. You have to accept that in 1999, accelerated 3D graphics were still in their infancy, but I sort of wished that the developers had gone with full 2D graphics instead in this case. 3D graphics, especially low-poly ones never age well. Whilst April's character model is quite detailed, the other characters are not, being very low poly and badly-textured which is a shame. The supporting cast may have actually had more depth to them had they had been 2D hand-drawn sprites instead. On a related note, Dreamfall suffered from stiff character animation, especially during dialogue scenes where aside from facial movements, the characters bodies weren't animated at all. Here, with TLJ it's at the other end of the extreme, with a lot of uncordinated arm and hand movement during spoken sequences.
Soundwise, there's not a lot to say here. The music's good and sets the atmosphere well, but there are a lot of annoying popping sounds everywhere, thanks to the archaic encoding of early MP3s that modern soundcards don't seem to like. Dialogue is well-spoken for the most part, but volume levels vary wildly with some dialogue being quiet whilst other parts being disproportionately loud.
The Longest Journey is a game that deserves to be played, however. If you like old school point-and-click adventure games, you'll feel right at home here. If you've already played Dreamfall but never played TLJ before, then you should do so as it does a good job of filling in the backstory that Dreamfall ignored for the console generation. For the price of a couple of beers and a dodgy kebab, you really can't go wrong.
The premise didn't really seem that promising at first. You take on the role of April Ryan, an art student with a sense of humour drier than the Sahara desert, who's been experiencing strange nightmares and who quickly finds herself embroiled in a battle between two rival factions across two worlds - Stark (23rd century Earth) and Arcadia (erm... a different Earth with magic and talking birds), as well as finding the ability to "shift" between these two worlds. I'm not going to go much further into the story here because it's something you really need to experience for yourself. Suffice to say, the story is far more involved than Dreamfall's
After putting up with Zoe Castillo's emo whinings in Dreamfall, I wasn't really keen on going through that all over again. Thankfully, April's persona is actually likeable and the scriptwriters did a great job here, successfully carrying her emotions through to a level that actually has you sympathising with her, rather than having you simply dismissing her as some spoilt, whiny rich kid, mainly because she's none of those things. Sadly, the other characters you interact with tend to border on the two-dimensional, even her close friends. You don't tend to learn much about them despite all the available dialogue options, and you quickly come to realise that they don't play that big a role in the main story anyway, especially after chapter 4.
Where TLJ shines however is with its humour. Some commentators here and elsewhere have said that the game tries too hard to be funny, or that the game is sarcasm overkill. I disagree. The sarcasm is a product of the time - this game was released in 1999, and who wasn't sarcastic back then? While the first characters you meet have a mix of American/South American and British accents, the humour is firmly British, which is intriguing considering that the developers of this game are Norwegian. There are a lot of genuine laugh out loud moments, and I haven't found myself laughing this hard at an adventure game since Monkey Island 2.
But then this is a genuine point-and-click adventure game. It's a proper old school game of pixel-hunting and solving puzzles, but this is one area where I do find myself agreeing with some of the other commentators: Some puzzles simply don't make any sense. Case in point: You have a police officer guaring a crashed hovership who's choking on dust. April has, in her possession a can of cola. Now, logic would dictate that you would give that can of cola to the police officer who would drink the stuff and then have the sudden urge run off to the toilet or something leaving the place unguarded, but no. Apparently, the correct approach is to take that can of cola, travel on the subway to the docks, use the paint mixing machine on it to shake it up, run back to the crash scene in record time before the can explodes and THEN offer it to the police officer who promptly soaks himself in the stuff. To quote the Angry Video Game Nerd: WHO WOULD KNOW THAT? Now I've been playing point-and-click adventures for years, right back to Maniac Mansion on Amiga, and even text adventures on hardware probably older than your mother (ever heard of the ZX Spectrum?), but I've never seen logic fail like this before, and I've never had to resort to walkthroughs (heh, try finding a walkthrough in 1987) either, but TLJ had me heading over to GameFAQs out of frustration.
The graphics haven't aged particularly well. Whilst the 2D backdrops are gorgeous, the 3D models are ugly. You have to accept that in 1999, accelerated 3D graphics were still in their infancy, but I sort of wished that the developers had gone with full 2D graphics instead in this case. 3D graphics, especially low-poly ones never age well. Whilst April's character model is quite detailed, the other characters are not, being very low poly and badly-textured which is a shame. The supporting cast may have actually had more depth to them had they had been 2D hand-drawn sprites instead. On a related note, Dreamfall suffered from stiff character animation, especially during dialogue scenes where aside from facial movements, the characters bodies weren't animated at all. Here, with TLJ it's at the other end of the extreme, with a lot of uncordinated arm and hand movement during spoken sequences.
Soundwise, there's not a lot to say here. The music's good and sets the atmosphere well, but there are a lot of annoying popping sounds everywhere, thanks to the archaic encoding of early MP3s that modern soundcards don't seem to like. Dialogue is well-spoken for the most part, but volume levels vary wildly with some dialogue being quiet whilst other parts being disproportionately loud.
The Longest Journey is a game that deserves to be played, however. If you like old school point-and-click adventure games, you'll feel right at home here. If you've already played Dreamfall but never played TLJ before, then you should do so as it does a good job of filling in the backstory that Dreamfall ignored for the console generation. For the price of a couple of beers and a dodgy kebab, you really can't go wrong.