Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

Following in the footsteps of the standout "The Longest Journey" but dropping the ball in the process.

Never has a gaming genre suffered such a slow death. At one point, adventure games were the hub of gamers, spawning sub-genres, and straddling the camps of light gamers and hardcore puzzle-solvers alike. Now, adventure gaming has become a niche genre, with less titles released each year, and only a few standout titles released in the last decade – not even the great Myst could keep pace.

By peeling back the layers of the adventure game, it’s easy to see what makes a good one, and conversely, why adventure games continue to go wrong. The first component of a successful adventure game is the story, where a well-paced tale and great dialog is essential. The second key component is interactivity – or in other words, the bits in the game that make it not like a movie. Adventure games of recent years tend to get the first bit right, and you’ll find some wonderful stories lurking inside most adventure games on the market. But interactivity is usually too minimal, clunky, or just boring.

One of those games that did get it right was The Longest Journey, released in 2000. The story was original, interesting, and although the gameplay was traditional adventure game fare, it threaded neatly into the plot. So now we have the successor, Dreamfall, to try and continue that success, and looking just at the story, presentation and pacing, Dreamfall has it all.

It picks up where TLJ left off, giving you three protagonists to control as you move between our logical, rational world of Stark, and the magical world of Arcadia. The only downsides to the story are how short it is and the irritatingly inconclusive ending (hopefully we won’t have to wait another six years for the sequel). But it’s not that Dreamfall is a particularly short tale, it’s just there’s so little to do. Instead of the wonderfully presented story being punctuated by some clever puzzles or gameplay, we get minimal conversations, simple puzzles, and the sorriest excuse for action sequences ever seen in an adventure game. Third-person 3D action games have been around for ten years, so it’s beyond us why Funcom struggled so hard getting it right.

The story is fantastic, as long as you’re prepared to sit back and watch the hours of dialog and cutscenes, and it isn’t particularly difficult even if you find the atrocious action scenes as offensive as we did. If you’re serious about adventure games, want to get sucked into a great story, or just want something light to while away the weekend, Dreamfall will satisfy. Otherwise, check out Quantic Dream’s Fahrenheit for a superb adventure game instead.