The Longest Journey is an amazing graphical adventure, where the player controls the protagonist, April Ryan, on her journey between parallel universes. Embark on an exciting and original journey of discovery, where you will explore, solve puzzles, meet new people, face terrifying monsters, learn, g...
The Longest Journey is an amazing graphical adventure, where the player controls the protagonist, April Ryan, on her journey between parallel universes. Embark on an exciting and original journey of discovery, where you will explore, solve puzzles, meet new people, face terrifying monsters, learn, grow, and live the adventure of a lifetime!
Over 150 locations spanning two distinct and detailed worlds
More than 70 speaking characters
40 hours of gameplay
20 minutes of high-resolution pre-rendered video footage
This remains the high-point of storytelling in games. I discovered it years after its release, and it blew away everything that I'd played before, and has yet to be matched since. This is my first review on GOG, and there isn't a better game to recommend.
I don't say this often, but TLJ is a very good example of how a good story, characters and dialogues (overall writing) is not enough to carry a game - or at least not a game this long. I quit after playing around 1/3 of it, and was bored around half of that time. This game offers next to nothing when it comes to interesting puzzle design and gameplay solutions. There's a lot of lengthy dialogue which only serves as exposition or infodumping - the fact that it's reasonably amusing and quite well written most of the time doesn't help much.
In the end, I think that the fact this game is highly regarded stems from it being influential at the moment of release. Now, fourteen years later, this game is probably one of the worst aged titles I am aware of. Only playable if you want an interactive book - and not a very interesting book at that.
I planned to play this for ages and now that I did, I have mixed feelings about it.
The story is ok, difficulty curve is somewhat inversed, it's harder at the beginning and gets constantly easier, because there are less and less different screens to visit at a time and less points to interact with.
The main problem with this game is, that it's boring and a waiting game most of the time, simply because the animations are extremely slow and the character is slower when running than other point'n'click characters are when walking and there is no way to exit a known screen instantly, which makes you walk a loooong part of the game, expeccially since there are many riddles where you have to walk the same spots up and down again and again.
The English voice acting is good, although not phenomenal.
Replay value is nil, but it was nice in a way, let's see how well made the second part of the series is.
What I really miss are the other languages it was translated into, they are available on the devs site but not here. :/
I've played plenty of adventure games from the Amiga era (Future Wars) to new games like Soma and this is simply the best. Not because of the graphics but the immersive story and the sheer length of the game itself. Don't wait and buy this one and prepare for a very long journey! The only way this game can be improved is some kind of remaster since it didn't age well.