Dreamfall Chapters: The Final Cut

Visually this is a great looking game. The game features great music and has great world building. There are no other redeeming qualities. Story is nonsensical and forced. Chapter five was infuriating and a complete waste of time. Most characters, the way they speak and their motivations and reasoning are simply infuriating. They can speak for 15 minutes and say absolutely nothing. Here is what it sounds like: “It is a thing of all things, and when the darkness pass the light when contemplating on a starry night do we even fathom the consequences of ones actions? But what are we or were we there? And all has faded. Of cause this all was written and what is written you cannot change. Not telling you why though!” Early chapters have a lot of swearing and characters which look like caricatures from Saturday morning cartoons. This clashes a lot with the tone of the story and especially sound design. A lot of the time the game can’t decide it wants to be whimsical fairytale or an edgy young adult novel ending up being neither. Gameplay is almost non-existent. Nothing to talk about here at all. You have rudimentary choice system which in the grand scheme of things doesn’t amount to anything.

Putting aside the obvious faults of the Telltale system (and I really think that the 'game' aspect is severely lacking in this adventure game), Dreamfall Chapters seems to be struggling with the very basics of presenting its narrative. The problems are twofold: 1. It too often expects you to pretend not to know certain things in order for you to stay immersed in the story. Like, for instance, you're supposed to pretend you don't know/remember that someone close to you is actually secretly a spy (which you learnt in the previous game). Or, later on, you're supposed to pretend you don't know your way around the city after you've run across the whole thing as another character about a dozen times. You get to witness some behind-the-scenes scheming of some of the characters, yet you can only confront them when the plot demands it. 2. Conversely, the game is also paced in such a weird way that you, the player, only get to learn some of the more important plot elements at the very end - which results in you playing increasingly short sequences as each of the characters (often barely doing a couple of minutes before switching back to another character) whilst getting bombarded with exposition. All this, coupled with the fact that they ditched the beautiful vistas and the sense of wonderment, and instead went for some kind of edgy grit (obligatory swearing and people having sex in the streets), makes this game quite a bit of a chore.

Dreamfall Chapters has some nice 3d art, decent music and voice-overs, but as a complete game it's just not worth the time and money you're going to spend on it. The storyline is chaotic, constantly references the first two parts of the series and just doesn't stand on its own. It doesn't truly resolve and becomes completely incoherent in the last chapter. It doesn't seem to have any solid overarching ideas. It doesn't properly develop any of the characters. Moreover, the decision to add "choices and consequences" into the mix only exacerbates all of the above mentioned problems without providing any value. The game would be significantly better off if it was completely linear. Either developers were overly ambitious and run out of time and money, or they were just riding the Kickstarter boom and milking gamers' nostalgia for The Longest Journey. Considering how long Chapters was in development and how much it cost, I would bet on the latter. I could add more negatives, complaining about simplistic "puzzles" and numerous issues with location design, but what's the point? It's the overall experience that really matters here, and the experience is nothing like what it was in the magnificent original. If you haven't already, definitely play The Longest Journey and stop there. It will feel farm more satisfying and complete without the sequels.

The TLJ with protagonist April Ryan, the game that put Ragnar Tørnquist on the map. It is known to many adventure gamers as one of the greatest adventure games ever made. Most the time when you play nearly any franchise or watch any movies series, and you get into it, you expect some continuity from episode to episode or film to film... This franchise takes a big dump on April Ryan and leaves April fans with mostly heart break... Hopefully you weren't that attached to the previous protagonist, her struggles, her story and were expecting any sort of solid continuity from TLJ to Dreamfall/ Dreamfall Chapters... because the sequel feels almost more like a spin off with it's own sequel... (It is not April Ryan's story) Instead the creator decided to make the story more than about April Ryan, made her a secondary character and decides to waste and end her story with a rather dull death scene that motivates and inspires "the new protagonist" that is randomly forced onto you at the beginning of the dreamfall spin off... You play as April Ryan in Dreamfall , but the depression she suffered from in the first game has completely eaten her away, the heroism and life has been sucked right out of her...then she dies on screen... and comes back in Dreamfall Chapters as a depressed/ emo ghost.... For fans who really enjoyed TLJ and formed some sort of connection to April Ryan, there is very little for you in both sequels expect massive disappointment... Chapters does very little to give you closure... The story continues to branch off and stray further and further from April Ryan. So, if you were a fan of the first game, loved the story, felt something real for the protagonist, found her relatable and wanted to see how her story panned out avoid the two spin offs like a plague. There was only one TLJ game and it's really all you need. If you don't mind seeing that character ripped to shreds and just want to see more of the world, then try the two spin offs out..

I'm a huge fan of the series, I waited for years for this, and the ending was basically a huge middle finger. It's like they meant to have more episodes, but they didn't have the cash for it, so in the final scene, everything is explained away with literally "That's how the story goes and that's what was written." That's literally one of the lines in the last sequence. I mean, come on.