3 and a half years later…

Great little article. I played The Longest Journey about a year after I’d completed Dreamfall. It was mostly a waste of time – I really have a hard time with point-and-click no-logic random puzzle crap. It’s one redeeming feature was seeing locations from Dreamfall, but as they were before ‘the collapse’, and locations such as the tavern in Arcadia rendered in 2D. It gave it a nice sense of familiarity. It was also kind of haunting having April’s apartment in The Border House – knowing what becomes of it.

I keep coming back to Dreamfall’s story over and over again. Whatever flaws the game has, the writing and characters (well, Zoe and April, plus Faith to a lesser extent) are just fantastically conceived and textured. I agree with a lot in this recent Eurogamer retrospective: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-04-24-retrospective-dreamfall-t he-longest-journey-article

You can read a hell of a lot into its story, which is one of the virtues of being rather open to interpretation. There’s certainly a lot of big themes, and little ones, all going on at the same time. I think there were a few too many unanswered questions at the end, but then I’d rather have too many than too little. After all, half the game is about imagination – The Dreamer, The Storytime, etc. It’s a story about stories.

Anyway, still waiting on Dreamfall Chapters. FFS. That’s been 5 years, and they haven’t even started it yet. Oh BTW I was lead here as your picture of Zoe is on Google’s 1st page of image results for her. She’s so pretty.

@Keith – thanks. I read over the wikipedia article on the Longest Journey skipping plot synopsis in case I wanted to play it. It does look more “old school” and April looks less annoying.

I also saw some screenshots labeled Newport. Funny thing is that in the Longest Journey the city seems to be a bright, rich, hi-tech metropolis. And yet, when Zoe visits it in Dreamfall it is a total dump. If you talk to NPC’s they mention that this place used to be much different, but I’m sure experience of Visiting Newport is much different for someone who played LJ. :P

@Tobias – I know… But I loved Sam & Max Hit the Road and I was afraid the new ones will suck and will be disappointed. I will check them out though. :)

If you like adventure games, I’m pretty amazed you haven’t checked out the new Sam and Max games. The production values are just incredible – great graphics, story and voices, and the puzzles are generally fun and intuitive. It’s well worth giving them a try.

You’re right that you really don’t miss much of Dreamfall’s story by not playing it’s predecessor The Longest Journey but when you get a chance you really should pick it up and play it. The Longest Journey is more along the lines of an old school point-and-click adventure game of yore and has it’s own engaging and epic storyline spanning across parallel worlds as well. Oh and it can have it’s fair share of convoluted inventory puzzles too. It’s an excellent adventure game in and of itself.

The lead designer on both games, Ragnar Tornquist, runs his own personal blog at http://www.ragnartornquist.com and occasionally posts about Dreamfall. He has confirmed that the third and final game of the trilogy, Dreamfall Chapters, is soon to be worked on and will be released in episodic format (which hits upon your post from Nov. 28th about Episodic Content).

Still, I concur, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is a great game and one which many may have overlooked. Thanks for the post on it.