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
IMPORTANT: one puzzle has game breaking bug (subway station). If you combine 3 items in slightly different order/way, April will refuse to perform specific action and complete the task. Make sure to save often and use DIFFERENT save slots for different locations, otherwise you'll end up replaying whole thing from the beginning.
Took me few hours to figure out this was a bug and not something I missed while playing...
Other than that and possible police station crash this game is marvelous. True classic. Don't miss it if you love adventures!
In my opinion, The Longest Journey easily has one of the best stories ever told in a video game. It just sucks in you and doesn't let go, you really want to know what happens next. The writing is wonderful and it truly has some of the most memorable adventure game characters. The voice acting is also incredibly good. This is probably my favorite point-and-click adventure game of all-time and I just can't recommend it enough!
The graphics were passable and the voice acting was solid and I must say I really enjoyed the characters and the game was funny at times as well and "Crow" especially added an additional dimention to puzzle solving you don't often see in adventure games. So the game hit most of the curtial elements an adventure game needs to hit so cudos for being adequate in that respect.
However that being said the story was hopelessly complicated and extremly confusing, the plot borderlines on unintelligble at times and it's very easy to miss key pieces of information that are just sort of slipped in there. I found myself repeatedly asking myself, "wait who is that again", "What he talking about?" and "I thought that was the other thing" You really do need a Ph.d in plot development to understand what the hell is going on half the time. Still though a very unique game storyboard in any case.
Also the game was quite longwinded at times leaving you stuck listening to charaters tell you stories that are both unnessary and honestly quite boring in order to move the game forward only to face a quiz at the end to see how closely you paid attention. Not my idea of a good time and quite lazy puzzle design if you ask me. My overall rating is general disappointment and I would not recommend this game.
There is no question that The Longest Journey is ambitious. It is massive in length, and it's story spans a vast array of settings. The sheer number of animations, cutscenes, backgrounds, puzzles and lines of dialogue is staggering. Despite this, I can't say I enjoyed this game. The puzzles were poorly explained, and it was often impossible to know why you were doing things until they were done. It contains far too much filler dialogue. April, the main character, speaks almost exclusively in paragraphs, and not in sentences. And graphically, the game hasn't aged well.
Let's start with the puzzles. This game commits almost every sin possible in adventure game design. Puzzles devolve into a long sequences, where the end outcome is frequently arbitrary. Sometimes there is no causality between action X and event Y, but you still must do X before Y occurs. For instance, at one stage in the game you must give a character a map to analyze, before a random pedestrian on the other side of the city drops a pizza box in a bin. It is almost on the same scale of implausibility as a butterfly flapping it's wings to cause a thunderstorm in China. And the game is full of these! Worse, is when you must repeat an action twice or more to do something. And the endless pixel hunts really drag. This is a great pity, as there are some genuinely well designed puzzles in this game, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
When you compare the graphics of this game to the likes of Escape from Monkey Island, or Grim Fandango, it's plain to see they haven't aged nearly as well. Backgrounds lack consistent style and are sometimes poorly laid out to allow navigation. The 3D models are ugly, but I find this more acceptable considering the age of the game. However, I can't forgive the subpar animations the game is filled with. I can't count the number of times I sat waiting for an extremely slow animation to play out. And the speed of April's walking over those massive scenes, even when she was sprinting, was monotonous. okay to extremely bad. I can understand why the quality control on this was low, as there was a massive volume of dialogue and characters needing to be voiced. I especially despised the wise cracking side kick 'crow'.
There is too much dialogue in this game. I know most adventure gamers love reading, and so do I. But I can only take so many overlong superfluous dialogue exchanges before my mind starts to wander. They could have halved almost every line spoken in this game, and not lost a thing.
The story was okay. The variety of settings was interesting, the over arching epic plot was alright, but there were too many inconsequential subplots which could have been cut.
Overall, I was fairly disappointed by this game. I'm a firm believer that less is more. If this was a quarter of it's current length, the production team could have spent much more time focusing on quality artwork, design and voice acting. Instead, they stretched the plot out too far, and the game suffered because of it.
