Ok, I just purchased TLG because it's 60% off (today only), I love point & clicks adventures and I heard it was really good. But is it really over 50 hours long? For a point & click, that just seems staggering to me. I mean, I thought Broken Sword was long at 20 hours but 50? WOW!

i don't remember if its that long, but you will surely need a bunch of hours if you listen to all dialogues, inspect every item/hotspot, dont rush through the game with a walkthrough etc.
i beat broken sword yesterday, TLG is definitely a lot longer.

and the best adventure i ever played.

I've heard anywhere between 20 and 60 hours, so I honestly have no idea.

i think it depends much on your playstyle

Both The Longest Journey and Dreamfall took me about 40 hours each. Not because I was stuck, but because I explored everything and talked about everything to everyone (Relatively often I even reloaded saves to see if other dialogue options give funnier responses).

I think it's the adventure equivalent of The Witcher series.

It is just not a game to rush through. You don't have to choose all the conversation trees at the beginning, the game won't punish you if you don't, but if you relax, set aside an hour for that first CD and just meet your friends and talk to them, find out about them and yourself through them, you will be much more immersed as you travel through the adventure. Also, as you meet races, take the time to learn about them, the fears, etc, you will find it resonates with today's world far too closely, but that makes it all the more interesting!

This is a story to be savoured, rather than a game to be played. It's like a good book you don't want to put down, but you force yourself to because you want it to last longer.

Try and make this the only game you play, and try and play it everyday until you finish, so it stays with you inbetween plays. Respect it as practically a work of art, and you will get so much more out of it.

It's the people, gamers and reviewers alike that extol this game, It's the reason it got so many 100%'s from reviewers and gamers on Metacritic, and why it's the top adventure game on that site, and in the top 30 of ALL games!

It's not a matter of DOES it take 40-50 to complete. It's a case of it SHOULD take 40-50 hours to complete! :)

Weeelll, if you play like me and press ESC all the time to not having to watch April running over the marketplace as a tiny black dot for like forever... it's not that very long.

I played completely through it over the last weekend and considering I had enough sleep too, it probably didn't even take 40 hours. More like 30 if I indeed did play 10h a day including friday *thinking* hmm..

So.. if you cancel all the nothing but running (very... veeeeerrrry.. veeeerrr*snore* huh? Ah, yes, SLOWLY..) parts, the journey is not so long at all ;-)

But the story is big enough - and that's what counts, isn't it? I'd prefer some short but deep, good story over any everlasting, boring one...

Ps: If you skip through all dialogs and know what to do, you may beat it in less than an hour I guess. Just do the spoon trick with the ESC key and warp around *lol*

Pps: I think UK_John's answer is superior to mine. But it'd be fun nonetheless to see how fast one could rush through TLJ, hehe =)

Running might be occasionally time consuming, but dialogues take more time. So, if you really want to skip it fast forward you can't spend listening 15 minute history lectures. But nevertheless I don't believe that you can finish it in an hour even if you skip all that dialogue. You could finish ordinary adventure game in hour or two without dialogue, but TLJ has more chapters and puzzles than your average game.

However I believe that just skipping April running didn't make you do 10 hours better time than myself. I believe that I made "worse" time than you, because it took me some time to figure out how to get that rubber ducky thing from the canal or how that altar thing work in the underwater cave. These two puzzles together probably cost me an hour or so and there are other similar examples. So, kudos to you for your puzzle solving ability.

I admit it has been a while since I played TLJ (I should do it again soon) but 50 hours? No!

There is a lot of dialog and occasionally running back and forth but it never gets tedious.

I'm trying to recall how long my last playthrough took and judgeing by the evenings it took I would say arounf 15 to 20 hours. I hardly have more time than 3 hours a night and it took me 5 evenings - granted, I know the puzzles. So maybe if you don't know what to do it could take considerable longer.
But then again, even a 20 minute one room adventure could take ages then.

Oh no, no, not at all. The ducky thingy actually was spoiled for me by another thread here on the forums (tho I'm not angry about that - it's the story that count's for me, not the riddles).

But if it's been some hours more or less I can't tell - I didn't look on the watch. So maybe it did even take me longer than you - maybe even less than claimed above. And since I can't tell how long it really took me (other than that I've played through it over the weekend / friday to sunday (and playing TLJ, time runs by pretty fast)), that really wasn't the point of my posting ;-)

The point was that you can save alot of time by skipping the running around.


[SPOILERWARNING] ˙pǝıɟsıʇɐsun ʎןǝʇǝןdɯoɔ ןǝǝɟ ı ˙˙˙ɥǝɯ ˙˙˙ןןɐɟɯɐǝɹp uǝʇɐǝq ʇsnɾ ǝʌ,ı [/SPOILERWARNING]
Yeah, it's upside-down.. so you'll have to really want to read this and probably spoil you the ending of Dreamfall ;-)

Yeah, your reaction to Dreamfall seems like the common opinion, ending-wise. I haven't beaten it yet and I'm enjoying it, but I'm not looking forward to the ending because of how it supposedly ends completely inconclusively. Actually, I didn't look forward to the ending of the first game, either, but that was because I didn't want it to be over. :)

And time-wise I'm gonna guess TLJ took me... 20 hours? Somewhere thereabouts, maybe a bit more.

I didn't deny that you can save some time by skipping running (this applies to all adventure games where skipping walking is possible. TLJ isn't even the worst, because at least April runs and doesn't just walk around painfully slow), but I just thought that dialogue and puzzles are actually more time consuming. There are relatively few areas where you don't have anything else to do than just ran through it (Syberia is example of the opposite as it has plenty of places where you can't do anything but run around).

And Dreamfall is supposed to be sort of "The Empire Strikes Back" of the trilogy, but unfortunately they haven't made the final game yet. It has a decent story, but I would sure love to know how it all ends. And while I agree with you that story matters, I think that it's nice to have some puzzles too. Without puzzles adventure game is just an interactive movie and going through it doesn't feel as rewarding as it would if you have to solve challenging puzzles to get forward in the story. I think Dreamfall's biggest flaw isn't the open end, but there are some areas which look really interesting, but you can't do anything but talk to a guy and then the chapter ends. They could have handled the same with lengthy cutscenes, now it's just disappointing that there's nothing to do in those areas than just running around.

Again: Don't read if you don't wanna know anything about Dreamfall.


Yeah, that thought struck me in exactly that moment the credits came up and I was like "WTF? O_o".... well, at least this worked out perfectly - it's been even more frustrating than Episode 2 -.-

Other than that, but still for critics, the second worst part is that they've tipped "the balance" (hehe) in favor of action sequences. I'd gladly had them removed, cause firstly I prefere TLJ calm atmosphere (had more of a "dream" than Dreamfall) and secondly the combat system is extremely rudimentary.. not to say stoopid and boring. Guess that's too thanks to console portation? *sigh*

Yeah, and (according to an RPS interview from a while ago) Ragnar denies that adding in combat and forced stealth sections was a bad idea. Said he plans on keeping it for Dreamfall Chapters (which should come out shortly after Half Life 3), but he said he'd work on making it less bad at least... Though I do think that Dreamfall being less calm and dream-like was part of the point, 'specially for April's story.

Nah *wave away* they can keep their chapters. I'm really no fan of bits and pieces - and I really hate when a good story gets fucked just to make you buy the next episode. I won't even start with such gameflow-killing marketing strategies and if anything I'll wait until the series is completed - like I did with Tales of Monkey Island... and now I never finished that one.

Nah, really, I don't think so. They can keep it. Dreamfall has been a wonderful display of what they plan to do - ripping apart everything, just to give you a curious feeling, so you buy the sequel. Those things never get a good ending - and without a good ending even the best story is a bad story. Just my few cents.