The Shortest Journey
“Could it be? A sequel to The Longest Journey…the story that single-handedly turned me on to adventure games, surely it must be amazing after nearly six years”… (Flash! days later)…“dang”.
Now don’t interpret my gloomy tone as a warning to stay the heck away, far from it. Dreamfall has many great qualities, which I’ll only briefly touch base on, however, I’m writing this review just how The Don himself cares to read it, ‘The Godfather wishes to hear bad news immediately’.
Dreamfall has a wonderful score of music, ambient sounds and voice matching. Slap on your nice headphones or crank up that ol` Bose Stereo System you have lying around, and trust me, you’re golden. Accompanied with some snappy tunes, the graphics are amazing, stable and most importantly constant. All too often you can tell when the animators have just run out of gas, Dreamfall’s team has clearly taken it’s time (again, 6 years!). Finally, the characters are both interesting and loveable, or hate-able, if you dig the bad guys. These things, to me, give the game a solid enough foundation to at least give it a try.
Now the bad stuff.
It’s a little presumptuous for a game that can be, as some would say, ‘Owned’ in eleven hours to call itself “The Longest Journey”. Now, granted, I know my way around the keyboard, and my pals at the Psychology Department where I attend college would say that I have pretty decent logic and spatial reasoning skills, however, the difference between me and, lets say, your dad-who-plays-video-games-to-feel-young-again, would add up to no more than +/- 1 hour of game time. Alternatively, it takes a pretty great story for you to beg for more. Without spoiling the climax of a triple-threat ending, it leaves you somewhat confused when the credits start rolling, almost a lack of closure.
“What happened to this person?”
“Are they OK?”
“Wait, Wait, Wait, did they make it?”
“I thought…wait…they said that…what?!”
The puzzles in this game are pretty fun, but sometimes I needed to call up my cousin, have him put down his fifth grade homework and ask him; “What do I do with these two halves of a broken key and a locked door?” Pardon my sarcasm, but the lack of violence and rapid action needs to be supplemented with challenging puzzles that make you use cumulative knowledge gained from whole adventure, and not just the three interactive items at-hand.
And if this rant weren’t rant-laden enough, I have one more beef. Dreamfall: The Longest Journey has absolutely zero replay value. While there are opportunities to choose responses in conversation as “Hostel” or “Neutral” or “Friendly” the only difference is the other person’s immediate response, but it in no way effects the outcome of the game. And once you’re done, it’s either in that pile of games you’ll never touch again, or up on Amazon.com so fast, your mortarboards will spin (assuming you’ve just graduated, and are still wearing one)
So yea, go and get it, play it at your leisure, have a little fun, listen to a pretty entertaining tale that goes from the future to the pseudo-middle ages in the blink of an eye. Just for your own sake, don’t expect half as much as I did, or you’ll write exactly 610 words complaining about it.
Brad Says: C+