Dreamfall Chapters: The Final Cut

Full disclosure: I'm not that far into the game. With that said, this is actually what drove me to write this review. The voice work (at least the English voice work) is outstanding, particularly from Charlotte Ritchie, who plays Zoë. To me, she was instantly likeable, charming and relatable. Down to earth but with a foundation of strength. Wherever else the game goes -- and that seems to be good places, from what I can tell so far -- the characters are what drive any great story, and these characters are great. Cheers.

The game does some good things with the 3-D perspective point and click adventure controls. I really love the world and characters are great too. If you love Stark and Arcadia, you will love this game.

Now, for those who don't know. Dreamfall Chapters is the continuation and end of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey which in itself is the sequel to the Longest Journey. Keep that in mind now. Mechanically, the game is an over-the-shoulder adventure game with some elements of old school Point&Click adventure games. So, imagine controlling a character but at certain points the cursor detaches from the camera for you to point and click stuff. That happens sometimes only. Most of the time you control the character and you move the camera angle so that you highlight interaction points in the game say objects or persons. This is where you trigger the characters' inner monologues or initiate dialogue with other characters. And overall the gameplay experience is a mess. A horrid mishmash of what would seemingly be clever reconciliation of 3rd person adventure games like Dreamfall: The Longest Journey with 2D point&clicks. The puzzles are just too simple and straightforward that the gameplay almost hindered the pacing at times. Forcing you away from the great story (which I'll describe later) and letting itself remind you that hey we used to be a point&click. It's painful to say as a gamer that the best part of this game wasn't the game part. That shouldn't be the case. I'd love it if gameplay and narrative melded together as one. But no, the cutscenes took hold of the narrative instead of the gameplay. Now, you'd think dear reader that that's how adventure games have always been. Well, I say phooey to that. I feel like Red Thread Games and their contemporaries aim to evolve the adventure genre. The wish to do away with cutscenes and have the player interact within what suppose to be a custcene. And unfortunately that aim wasn't successful here. Now, for the story, oh boy was it interesting to say the least. Don't get me wrong I feel satisfied with how Dreamfall continued and ended here. Oh, by the way dear reader, if you haven't played the previous games or at least Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, you'd be kinda lost with this game. Reason is it references a lot of who's and what's of the previous games without pausing to clear stuff up

*As of Book 3* The story is great and the puzzles are fine for the most part. The performance on most PCs is dismal. Reportedly this has been improved with the upgrade to the Unity 5 engine, which is currently in beta. I wish I could say more about the performance upgrade, but RTG has made the beta available only to users of a certain vapour-based platform. New books and patches are also released on the other platform first. Book 3 was released on a Thursday with a bug for some people (altered in-game choices). On Friday RTG released a hotfix. The other platform updated their version of the game immediately. GoG updated on Monday. Since distribution is part of the experience, I include it in the review. Same price, different experience. Will avoid GoG in the future. Story: ***** Gameplay: **** Graphics: *** Performance: ** GoG Distro: *

Dreamfall Chapters emphasizes both the positives and negatives of the Kickstarter model of producing adventure games. The biggest plus for fans is that, by bypassing commercial publishers with a need to make the game accessible to new players, Red Thread have been able to make a true continuation of the 2006 Dreamfall storyline. This is a hardcore journey into the Longest Journey / Dreamfall mythology - and that's an exciting prospect for those of us who have been following this story for almost twenty years. The negative of Kickstarter is that game development goes from being the 'private' side of the gaming industry to another 'public' one. Opinions are formed and expressed well before a release is ready for them. It's not surprising that the reviews here on GOG and elsewhere are diverse as they're actually reviews of several different products. The original and somewhat buggy three-hour Book 1 release in 2014 is an entirely different beast to the beautiful, smooth-as-silk, 15+ hours of the Final Cut release now available. It's clear that the episodic model was a necessity to make the Kickstarter model work, rather than the ideal way to experience this game. Although a fan of the series I waited for the Final Cut release before playing and I'm glad I did. The result is a rich story told in an incredibly engaging way. Dreamfall Chapters is most definitely a sequel to Dreamfall and not The Longest Journey; its focus is on cinematic storytelling and engaging the player's feelings - rather than creating a series of tricky puzzles to solve. And although that approach was controversial in 2006, it makes perfect sense to Chapters where we're making choices which impact with characters we've known and loved for two decades. I'm grateful for the Red Thread team for their commitment to refining this game many months after the Book 5 release, and for the early adopters whose enthusiasm helped Chapters through its three year journey to its current, excellent, state.