Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

"Are you as excited about a TLJ sequel as I was? Sorry to hear that."

I've never been a huge fan of adventure games. It's not that I didn't like the genre, it's just that I was just never exposed to it, save for a few games like Beavis and Butthead's Virtual Stupidity and maybe a few others not worth mentioning. I remember the day I came across The Longest Journey. It was an impulse buy, and one of the best I've ever made. I fell in love with the game immediately - it's atmosphere, characters, plot, dialogue, everything was so immersive and gripping that I couldn't put it down until I was done with it. I've since gone through quite a few adventure games trying to find a match for TLJ but was disappointed through and through - none gave me the same satisfaction. I forgot about adventure games for a while, until recently, when I walked into my local Gamestop and saw this game on one of their shelves. You can imagine my excitement. I bought it immediately and let me tell you, disappointment is a *****.

Graphics 10/10
Not much to say, the graphics are great, the areas look nice, the characters are all designed well, no shortage of eye candy here.

Sound 10/10
Great voice acting, great music, nothing to complain about. I especially liked the background tune for Venice despite the fact that it made me want to go surfing (which is totally inappropriate considering the circumstances).

Gameplay 2/10
This is what is supposed to make adventure games good, right? Right. Conversely, bad gameplay also makes them a waste of my time and money, as is the case with this game. First of all, gone is the tried and true point-and-click interface of just about every adventure game ever. Apparently the developers of Dreamfall thought that the old way of playing adventure games is outdated and no one would want to play a point-and-click game. Now I have no problem with progress, so long as we're progressing to something better. In the case of Dreamfall, the progression to a more 'consumer-friendly' looking 3D world in which you run around in third-person as you would in a crappy sequel to an awesome adventure game is more of a regression than anything else. And the main reason for that is the controls. Oh god the controls. This is probably the main reason why adventure game developers should stick to point-and-click - try playing the game and you'll see what a pain the controls are. Not to mention that a 3D environment makes searching for interactable items that much more annoying, but they fixed that too! Now you can just right click and scan the area for anything interactable which pretty much kills the whole point of the process in the first place. Ugh.

And yes, the combat. One might say "Well what's wrong with combat? that makes a game more fun and challenging!". In most cases I would agree, but in the case of an adventure game, combat is simply unnecessary. Especially when it's as base and boring and pointless and frustrating as it is in Dreamfall. You basically have two options, attack and block. You exchange blows until either you or your opponent is dead. All in all, the combat adds nothing to the gameplay except for frustration.

Story: *shrugs*/10
It didn't catch me like the first one. I think this whole series should have just ended with TLJ. The balance is restored, everyone is happy, end of story. You don't have to throw in poorly constructed concepts with corny names like 'The Collapse' and 'The Wire', it only shows you had nothing else to add to the plot which isn't surprising because there just wasn't that much more to add. Maybe if the dialogue was better written it would have been more gripping. But it wasn't, so that's that.

Something tells me that the developers, instead of spending time on more realistic characters and interesting dialogue, just got the bare necessities out of the way so they could concentrate on pretty backgrounds that you never cast more than a passing glance at. If there was at least any reason to stick around and marvel at the surroundings then I wouldn't mind, but unfortunately this game requires minimal exploration and you're pretty much forced to go along your boring linear path with its boring linear interactions while figuring out a few fairly simple puzzles along the way.

Overall, with its crappy references to Internet catchphrases which were totally unnecessary ("where's your goddess now?" give me a break) to a creepy girl in a TV which is such a blatant rip-off of the Ring that it makes my head hurt, Dreamfall just doesn't cease to disappoint. I can go on and on but you get where I stand in regards to this game by now. I couldn't even finish the damn thing - halfway through it I quit, installed Planescape: Torment and I haven't been happier since.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/14/06