Customer Reviews

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

5 star:		(65)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(28)
1 star:		(32)

 

 

Six years. Quite a long time to be waiting for a sequel to an adventure game. It is also quite a long time for graphics, hardware and gameplay to change. When the Longest Journey came out, it was heralded by critics as being one of the best adventure games a person could buy. It incorporated a terrific story, wonderful voice work and, at the time, good graphics that helped bring depth to the genre. Now, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is out, a direct sequel to the events of the first game. Is it everything we could hope for? Well, that depends on what you're looking for.

A lot of reviews out there, including here on amazon.com, have talked about various aspects of the game. The negative points discussed were the easiness of the gameplay, the bulkiness of the controls and the horrible combat. The positives have been over-whelming the terrific, complex and utterly addictive story and plot. So, depending on what you are looking for, you will either really love this game or really dislike it.

AS far as the gameplay is concerned, I tried playing it with a mouse and keyboard but the controls felt wonky to me. I am a console player mostly and because of my lack of affinity with the mouse and keyboard for third person controlled games I spend a good deal of time walking into things and the walls. However, plugging in a controller, all of my complaints went away. I'd recommend trying a controller if you have any problems, as the game seems better suited to it (probably due to the fact it is also an Xbox game).

The difficulty has been lessened from The Longest Journey. One one hand, this is definitely a valid complaint. However, my complaint with the first game was that there were times where the puzzles seemed utterly illogical and were very order-specific. I would spend a long time trying to get something accomplished simply because I didn't do it exactly how the game wanted me to. In that aspect, Dreamfall lessens any frustrations to allow you to enjoy the story more fully. That said, the puzzles do lack the depth of The Longest Journey and adventure games in general. I wish they were a bit more difficult or took a little more brain power to figure out what to do.

The combat is a bit clunky. It is comprised of block, light hit and strong hit. A rock, paper, scissors type gameplay ensues where a strong hit will break through a block, a block defends against a light punch and a light punch can break someone from doing a strong attack. However, the controls are a bit wonky as well, making battles easy but unintuitive. You can also slide to the side, forward and back while blocking. While it's not up to par with fighting games like Dead or Alive, what do you want from an adventure game?

Actually, calling it a game might be stretching it a little. And I don't mean this in a bad way. Playing this game reminds me of another fantastic adventure game called Indigo Prophecy, but without the simon says style gameplay. Here, you will move from place to place, work on puzzles, do some stealth and some clunky fighting. But the gameplay is there to pull you in and create an interactive story. A cinematic story that has you at the center. I like this approach.

Graphically, I think the game is stellar. There've been complaints in this department as well, but I think the game is pretty stunning. While there's no way it could live up to the powerhouse of, say, Oblivion, what is here is terrific. The colors are vibrant and lush, the settings are absolutely beautiful. Casablanca, the starting city, feels like a mix of futuristic landscapes with a traditional Spanish-style living. Add to this the vibrant color scheme and terrific art direction, and I think the game is stunning.

One department no one seems to be complaining about is the sound. From the beautiful music to the very competent voice staff, everything runs well. Some characters are a little lacking, not necessarily in their voices but in the direction. Sometimes it seems as if the voice actors don't know the context of what they are saying and stress words wrongly or don't have the excitement or fear that one would have in their situations. As an example, in the beginning someone is afraid of something (I'm being purposefully vague) and cries "No! No!" but it's almost as if the threat is a mere bother as opposed to a possibly life-altering event. Other times, though, the voice actors are terrific in conveying the emotion.

The game scales really well. While I'm playing it above the recommended specs, there's nary a fault or bug that I've come across. There's no slowdown from what I've seen. It also scales terrifically well to fit your monitor. I've played it on a regular 19" all the way up to a widescreen monitor and it is terrific. The game was made to be played in 16:9 widescreen. Like I said earlier the controllers work terrifically with the game. I am using an Xbox 360 controller and I haven't had a single problem, save that the trigger buttons don't register.

One confusing problem is the constant presence of loading screens. There are a ton of them breaking up cutscenes as well as action. It's a little disappointing. I'm sure part of the problem was to help make it playable on both the Xbox and the PC. But load screens are a normal part of our life now and even the "triple A games" like Half Life 2 utilize them. And the loading screens in Dreamfall, while frequent, aren't long by any means. So, to me, it is a minor nuisance that I completely ignored and only bring it up because of other reviews out there commenting that reviewers aren't bringing it up ;)

All of this is simply the mechanics, though. What lies at the heart of this game, much like The Longest Journey, is a story. A story that is exciting, mysterious and emotional all at the same time. The Longest Journey was, at the time, probably one of the best stories I had seen in a video game. Dreamfall has, in my opinion, blown that story out of the water. People will probably argue this with me, but I think Dreamfall's story is definitely a bit better. It seems more urgent this time around. Partly, this is because of the fact its more of an "action adventure" game as opposed to a point and click game. Whereas in The Longest Journey there were instances where you were chased, you couldn't die. Here, things seem a bit more dire and urgent. The pacing of Dreamfall is also excellent and helps keep you moving from point to point. Ragnar Tornquist has a much better control of the story and spins a yarn fitting of a novel. I don't want to talk about the story at all in order to allow everyone a chance to view it with virgin eyes. To get the story across, there is a ton of dialogue. Much like the first game, Dreamfall allows its characters to talk and talk about their lives, what's going on in the world and the plot. While playing The Longest Journey isn't necessary per se, characters from it will show up in surprising ways, starting off from the very beginning. A small caveat about the story. Yes, the story doesn't end so much as set up events for a third game. However, if you look back at The Longest Journey, you would also find a game that doesn't end. It, too, basically explains what would happen in the second game and leaves so many threads open. Here's hoping the game sells well enough to merit a third game.

So here lies the crux. The reviews here and your enjoyment of the game will come to this: do you want a game that puts gameplay above story or a game that places story above gameplay. If you choose the former, you probably won't like this game as much. However, if you are like me and enjoy the latter, I can't recommend any other game higher than this one right now. I can normally overlook most flaws or gameplay issues in a game, if it keeps me enthralled with a terrific story. I enjoy story-centered games a ton. So I feel confident rating this game as a five star simply because I never had a dull moment. I compare both The Longest Journey and Dreamfall to novels. Very dense and filled with backstory, characters and plot, Dreamfall isn't a typical video game. You have to really want to get to know everything and everyone in it to get the most out of the game. If you want to really sink your teeth into a story and know everything there is to know about a fantastical world, there's no better place than Dreamfall.

I've read a number of reviews which complain about how hard it is to control the characters in this game in the pc version. The solution to this problem is to go into your computer's keyboard settings and set the key repeat delay to long (the lowest setting), and the repeat rate to slow (again, the lowest setting). This will solve the problem (also solves this problem in the new Tomb Raider: Legends game). The keyboard settings can be found in the control panel (go to Start, Control Panel, Keyboard), and click okay after making the changes.

Ordinarily, you wouldn't want your keyboard to work this way. When you press the curser key, you want it to move repeatedly and quickly across the computer screen. Or when you want delete a sentence, you want the backspace key to repeatedly go back quickly, without having to keep pressing the backspace key. But for some games that use the keyboard to control a character, you need to keep the keyboard from rapidly repeating the key you are pressing, else holding down a key even for a short period will cause the character to keep moving, even after you've taken your finger off the movement key.

I've just begun the game, and the graphics are very nice, and the controls are very intuitive. But I do wish they had eliminated the mild profanity I already encountered. I don't think it's necessary for the story, and it might offend some people. Also, the frequent loading from disk is somewhat distracting to the story, but at least it doesn't take long.

If the info about the keyboard was of benefit to you, it might be a good idea to click on the button here at Amazon which indicates you found the review helpful. If enough people do so, the review will appear on the first page, and will more likely be seen by others having the same problem.

I've played this game, as well as the original The Longest Journey (twice). I remember when TLJ came out, I was stunned by the quality of the voice acting, and the graphics were rich, truly excellent for the day, and the gameplay was adequate, with challenging puzzles and and an interesting story line. When the story ended it left me wanting more. I was hoping for a similar experience with Dreamfall, but it was a bitter disappointment.

First, the good, for there were some good things about this game (despite my rating). The voice acting was excellent, better than the original. The graphics were also quite good, very rich and detailed. The plot was interesting and captivating, as far as it went.

Now, the bad, and there is quite a bit of bad. Immediately, when I started playing, I noticed that simply controlling the game was extremely difficult. It took a good, solid 10 minutes just to learn basic controls for the main character. Yes, the controls were designed for console play, which is, IMHO, a mistake, but it is no excuse for the abysmal interface that was developed for this game. I've played many console games that had excellent interfaces.

The character and the camera were both difficult to control, and often I found myself struggling during gameplay to make both behave the way I wanted and expected them to behave. There were problems in a few caverns where the ceiling was so low that the camera would not stay in an appropriate place so that I could see what was going on around the character. Actually, enclosed areas in general were the bane of my gameplaying experience.

Picking objects to interact with was awkward as well. Since there was no direct way to pick objects, the developers created a very inexact system for picking the object closest to the character. For objects that were very close together, or far away, this made interaction difficult to manage. To combat this, they created a special "look" mode, where the character could look around, see objects to interact with, and then cycle through multiple objects that were in focus, but this really detracted from the overall gameplay since it had to be used so often to manage object focus but was such a slow way to interact with the scene. The look mode was also a bit difficult to control, since at 0 and 180 degrees there was a discontinutiy in the motion where the direction in which you moved the mouse had to be *reversed* to continue around the "look" circle. In addition, because this system was so inexact, actual object or scene interaction throughout the whole game seemed to have been kept to a bare minimum. This was a major frustration after the previous TLJ game, where objects could be clicked on using a mouse pointer for interaction, and there was a plethora of objects to actually interact with. One of the joys of the original TLJ was just finding things to click on and hearing April's response. That was gone in Dreamfall.

The combat system, while one of the most interesting aspects of gameplay, was also very shallow, and it was used so seldom I often found myself wondered, especially during the many, many moments when I wasn't in combat, "Why did they bother?" The original TLJ had no combat system, with any kind of in-game violence (as oppossed to out-of-game violence, like when you would take the keyboard and bash it over your monitor in frustration because a puzzle was driving you bonkers, not that I ever did that, heaven forfend) being handled in the same way as any other basic object interaction. After playing Dreamfall and using their combat system, I understood why TLJ didn't have a combat system of its own. It really wasn't necessary, and didn't add anything to the game.

Of course, I had just finished playing TLJ (again) before I purchased Dreamfall, so I was going from a reasonable interface to . . . this, so perhaps it hit me harder than it might have hit other people. On the other hand, it is a horrible interface, period.

So, aside from game control, there were also other problems, like the fact that there wasn't nearly as much actual *game* in this game as I expected. Oh, granted, I sat in front of my computer staring at the screen for quite a while as the game ate up processor time on my computer, about a good 20 or 25 hours or so, and very little of that time was actually spent loading or unloading or waiting because my computer couldn't handle the game (it could, no problem). The problem was that most of this time seemed to be composed of cutscenes and non-branching dialog. I felt like I was playing a movie! I can count on my fingers the number of long, important gameplay moments I was actually involved in, moments where I actually felt like I was accomplishing something. Sure, there were lots of moments of control stuck between the long, long sections of non-branching dialog and lengthy cut scenes, but many of those were so mind-numbingly simple that I can't possibly count them as being actually interactive. For instnace, and I'm not making this up I swear, there was one part where one of the main characters shows up in town, has a conversation (non-branching), and then you walk the character up some steps and open a door, and that's it! That's all the interaction you get for that section of gameplay! Really, what was the point?

Another thing I found rather pointless was that your character could die in this game. Now, normally, for most games, this wouldn't bother me, but it was just so... so... *Useless* in Dreamfall. There was little, or no, death in TLJ, but it seemed like everywhere you turned in Dreamfall there was another opportunity to get your character fried or shot or stunned or captured, and then it game over, man! Game over! You'd get a scene of your character dying, slowly, and you'd have to wait for the animation to finish before you could reload. I'm impatient, I know, but in a couple of places, where death was so well known that I might have called it "friend", that delay was immensely frustrating. I mean, I knew I'd screwed up, why make me suffer needlessly? I suppose that death added something in Dreamfall in a couple of places, but most of the time it just felt really unnecessary, an extra, added frustration when I really just wanted to focus on the puzzle.

And, speaking of puzzles, there were prescious few in Dreamfall. I'd say there were, perhaps, four, maybe five true puzzles in the game, none of them particularly difficult (except for one small part of a puzzle that was ridiculously difficult, where you had to know to notice something *before* you could possibly know that you had to notice it, and after the something happenned, it wouldn't happen again, so you couldn't notice it after you knew to notice it... If you can follow that, I'll give you a dollar.) Most of the rest of the "puzzles" were actually just chores with no actual challenge. A character in the game lays out exactly what you need to do, like "Go to person x, get object y, and bring it back to me," and then you do it, step by tedious step. Or, and I loved this (that was sarcasm), you would be confronted with a task, and then *your* character would say, unprompted, "Oh, *I* know what to do! I need to see person x about object y, so I can use it in this situation!" There were also several "puzzles" where the "puzzle" part seemed to be missing... What I mean is, is it really a puzzle when the only possible path is obvious and unavoidable? For instance, you need to get into a building to advance the story, and you don't know how, but since there are prescious few objects to interact with in the scene, and you don't have anything in your inventory, and when you look at an object in the scene and the game tells you, "I bet I could get in that building if I used that scene object," there really isn't any question about what to do. Right? Is that a puzzle?

I think I'm perilously close to ranting here, or, maybe I passed that threshold several paragraphs back... Well, there was only one more thing that I found objectionable: the story. It's not that the story was bad. As I said before, the plot was engaging, as far as it went. But, given that this is a game, and given that technology has advanced some since the old days of adventure gaming, doesn't it seem like playing the game should have, I donno, some kind of *impact* on the storyline? I mean, the game controls were abysmal. The combat was, let's face it, a joke. The puzzles were too easy. Wouldn't you think that there would at least be some kind of variability in the storyline to make up for these shortfalls? Some kind of impact that user choices might make on the plot? There were prescious few actual choices that could be made in the game... Shouldn't they have had some kind of purpose? As it was, it seemed like there was no choice, that the plotline was excruciatingly linear. The most frustrating part was that, especially towards the end, the main character was making choices that made no sense to me, and that I would never had made in her position, but the option to make a choice of my own was never given.

Also, the story seemed to fall appart towards the end, with events occurring that had no apparent logic to them. I'm not saying that there was no logic, but since the game left off without explaining, essentially, *anything*, all I was left with were a bunch of freak, nonsensical events that added up to a lot of chaos. Ugh, that was frustrating beyond belief. To make matters worse, the game ended unresolved, and I suspected that such was the case, but I ended up having to sit through something like ten minutes of wrap-up cutscenes that explained nothing *after* I'd come to this conclusion, just in case I was wrong and there was actually more gameplay. Maybe it only felt like 10 minutes... No, that can't be right, since it felt like half an hour. Anyway, at least the original TLJ *finished* its storyline, tying up most of the loose ends, leaving only a few threads floating out there. Dreamfall left *every* thread unresolved! (Or, perhaps, antiresolved? Below-zero, negative resolution? Is that even a concept?)

Okay, I'm fairly sure I've gotten solidly into the "ranting" now, but, I should say that, despite all these problems, the game wasn't a complete waste of money. The voice acting was truly excellent, there were some neat concepts in the game, the story had its moments, and the graphics were quite good. I guess I just wish that the developers had been more upfront about how I was actually purchaing a computer animated b-movie with limited interactivity, and a side of frustration, rather than an actual game.

Adventure gamers like to get all nostalgic, and can you blame them? The point-and-click era passed into gaming history more than a little while ago. If asked, many of them will point to The Longest Journey as the genre's swan song. That was six years ago, a time when the recommended system was a 266MHz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM. In picking back up the series -- a sequel of sorts -- the goal was to embrace the advancements since then and with them evolve the form of the adventure game. But natural selection is as hard at work in the videogame environment as anywhere else and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey finds itself right back at the top of the endangered species list.
A number of issues put it there, but none so conspicuous as the very fact that it struggles to even be a game. Throughout its entirety, the bulk of the gameplay involves ferrying whichever character you happen to be playing to the next event, and then watching it play out. And while to some degree that's always been the nature of adventures, the cinematics are typically the carrot rewarded for getting past some obstacle. But in Dreamfall, much of the time all that's asked of you is to control moving your character from one place to another; that's it -- not too challenging that. Neither is it very reward worthy.

And when you do arrive there, be prepared to stay a while. Long-winded conversations ensue, the likes of which leave children scarred for life from family holiday gatherings. Dreamfall comes to the line between adding dimension to characters and giving too much information and smashes through it without so much as a thought of applying the brakes. Oftentimes exchanges stretch into several minutes, and that's before getting around to whatever it was that advances the story. These progressively blur together over the course of the game as "playing" gets dispensed with entirely for extended stretches that move from one in-game cut-scene to the next without you doing more than looking on.

That's something you get accustomed to doing a lot of. The move to a fully 3D world has gone well technically, but it is an empty shell. The hunting for the magic pixel and MacGyver-like combining of unlikely items to solve puzzles are gone, but there's not much to take their place. You do occasionally pick up a thing here to use over there, but the placement of problem and solution are so elementary that it hardly seems fair to call them puzzles.

The other aspect of the new 3D engine that could have picked up some of the slack was the addition of stealth and beat-em-up action. It goes disastrously. The fighting, hand-to-hand or armed depending on the character, is a numb, mushy, button-mashing mess. Sluggish response turns it into more a matter of guessing the right timing to land a couple of attacks while circling your foe. And just making it so that pulling the left trigger puts your character in that over-used crouch to sneak around levels does not constitute developed -- much less good -- gameplay.

All that leaves is the drawn-out telling of a somewhat intriguing sci-fi/mystical story. Granted, for fans of the original it will be fairly compelling, and yes, it's the sort of stuff adventure fans dig on -- complete with its sloppy ending. And the new technology does come through in the presentation department. The visuals are ok, the soundtrack adds just the right atmospheric touch and the voice acting is solid enough, if not quite Academy Award material. Edited down to a tight package this could probably make a pretty good machinima feature (or Sci-Fi original motion picture for that matter). But as a game, it fails.

I sat for a while before writting this thinking what to say about the game, so here it goes. My reviewers tilt is high cause I love adventure games!!!

I was giddy like a school boy with his first crush when they announced Dreamfall but was worried that the turn to an action/adventure style with sneaking, fighting and such could damage the experence and it has.

This game suffers badly from consolitius having been seemingly designed with Xbox mainly in mind. As such it suffers from low resolution characters, backgrounds that clearly look painted and not alive and clunky controls. Gone is the next generation graphics(as in obilivion and HL2) to be replaced with graphics that look quite dated. The controls was designed with the Xbox in full mind, so gone is the mouse. The fighting action sequences are very poorly done and not at all designed well, often feeling more of like a button mashing contest. Combat as a whole should have been eliminated from this game if it was gonna be done this poorly, animations are subpar, actual combat controls are non-responsive often taking place a few seconds after you push the button...

The Story is not up to the name "The Longest Journey", another reviewer said it best....felt like they forgot to tie up the ending!!! And the game is short, to short for a 40buck game with flaws IMO

In a shrinking field of adventure games there are few pickings so beggers can't be choosers...I just wish funcom would remember who made them in the first place.... PCgamers!!!!

The original TLJ is one of my favorite games of all times, so getting the sequel was a no brainer. But while Dreamfall has some good things about it, overall it's a major disappointment even without the unavoidable comparison to the great original.
Basically, it seems like everybody involved with the game ran out of ideas. There are very few puzzles, most of them are very easy, and fairly dull. The game advances more like a movie. While the environments are pretty and fun to explore you feel that you're really not controlling anything, but rather are being controlled by the game writers.
The dialogue is great, and so it seems at times that the story is good, but it really isn't. The plot really seems like a poor rip off of Akira and F.E.A.R. and has a lot of generic science fiction cliches. A lot of the characters and plot lines seem to be completely irrelevant to the main plot, and while they're fun while you're doing them, at the end it all feels pointless. You get to switch between three characters, two of which are fairly annoying and add nothing to the experience, serving more as a gimmick.
The ending has been much discussed, which is ironic because there is no ending. Without revealing too much, after finishing the game I felt cheated, because despite all my efforts, my impact on the events of the story remains minimal. This is very artsy and post modern, but people want adventures and at least some kind of a resolution that makes sense, rather than cliches and post modernist smugness. The action and stealth elements are just annoying and seem to be intended simply to stretch the game which takes about 10 hours to finish, very different from the truly long and engaging TLJ.
Overall I enjoyed the first 2/3rd of the game just because of the characters and the dialogue, even though it didn't come close to comparing to the longest journey. But the ending is so contrived, cliche and unrewarding, it brings my tilt for the game way down.

This game does not work for 4 reasons:-

1) It comes after Longest Journey and is not even a pale shadow of its predecessor.

2) Its too short ---It falls as soon as you start to dream.

3) You don't get steeped in the atmosphere.

4)Apart from Zoe you do not connect with any one of the other characters.

Graphics are beautiful and solid,interface is nice too, even the sound is robust but the story too short and as soon as you are beginning to enjoy the whole experience -----it ends.

I am feeling let down because I hoped so much and I got quite less.

The worst part was distributing game time between three characters.The designers should have just concentrated on Zoe and made the chapters more immersive and the story a little longer.

Forgive me if I am being a little harsh on a good adventure game because they are a dying genre nowadays but I never ever said wow! or awesome! even once and the fault does not lie in the game but the very fact that it follows the footsteps of the finest adventure game ever made till now, which I have not only played time and again despite its linearity but because its a story worth reading forever until dreamfall.

Anyways happens ----hope we get a better game later.

Having read some reviews I was somewhat disappointed, usually I don't write reviews, but in this case I wanted to share you my opinion of the game as a fully fan of The Longest Journey.

I've played both The Longest Journey and DreamFall to the very end. Usually I can tell from playing an adventure game for like half an hour if it's good or not, as being fan of adventures like for example Police Quest series, Little Big Adventure, Syberia 1/2, return to mystery island etc. I was sold from the very start of this great sequel of The Longest Journey.

Ok, so far my intro. Now let's go ahead to the game itself.

I did found Dreamfall a bit shorter than it's previous version, as the graphics were of course a bit less in the first version of The Longest Journey there was more story to my idea.

Dreamfall's graphics are really stunning and I was surprised to see the character Zo? in her underwear on bed when you start to play, as for fans of the previous version know April Ryan started of the same way, when she suddenly was in the dream world.. Yes in her underwear.
Guess the creators didn't want to skip this opening detail and make Dreamfall for some of us males interesting from the start as well:)

The storyline is great, I must say it would be nice if you'd played the original version as on some point it's difficult to understand what they are talking about even for me it was sometimes difficult, as I played the original version years ago..

Nevertheless they did a good job in having the characters tell about themselves, so even if you have not played the original version before you get some information about their past.
And for myself it was good to catch-up again where the game left of years ago.. After these years I've forgotten a lot about most details.

Also the person you are now playing (Zo?) is a nice sweet character with an English accent, April was a lot tougher.. but don't worry you get her to play too again ;)
That's the whole beauty of Dreamfall, it's really nice to play each character and see how their paths cross each other literally!
Even there are scenes where you have to work with each other, both Zo? and April, you get to talk to your own playable character sometimes which is very fun and interesting at the same time.

During the game you also get to make decisions, while talking to people. To say yes, or no or act defensive, offensive etc.
The character you speak to will respond depending on your answers.
I don't really believe any answer would screw things up, or make you go on a different way.

So far for me there was only 1 occasion where my answers would lead to an extra ticket for a little girl when being in Japan, if you did it wrong you only got yourself 1 ticket and left a girl behind.
Also here I don't believe it would have resulted in a different story line, sometimes you get to see some more or less scenes that's all I think.

It would have been nice if you really would get alternate endings, but to my knowledge there is only 1 way to go.. believe me , I did try a couple of scenes over and over again to see if it would do me any good or not ;)

The game play is great, I've played the whole game with the keyboard not any problem. You just have to get used to it, which takes a little moment.
Point is, you do not want to use the mouse when walking... Only use it for looking around if you want to see something in particular. For the rest, if you stop moving your character the camera will center behind your character, making it possible for you to see things ahead.
It worked out great for me, so I'm sure if will for you too.

Fighting isn't that hard too, go down the gym and practice till you get it right.
I used ASDW for walking and LK for fighting, space blocking. It works out the best, again camera goes by itself. Try and see, so all negative comments in the reviews about that are to my opinion not relevant.

The ending... well, indeed it also leaves me with unanswered questions, so hopefully a quicker sequel than this one against the 1st version years back.

Also what I found to be nice about the game in general was the way to solve puzzles, I know they could have made them a bit harder, but at least you didn't have to run around all way back too often to get items.
Most of the times you can find the solution in the running scene.
If you are stuck, usually your mobile phone comes in with a solution. Every puzzle was quite well to solve with some common sense.

I absolutely recommend this game and if you have not played the 1st version, buy that one too. It's really great and will help you understand the story more.

I'm even thinking about playing it again, just to refresh my memory again and perhaps already answers some of the unanswered questions I have still.

Hoped you like my preview and it's of some help to you, if so I might do this more often for games.

When I was little, I played a lot of educational computer games for kids. I enjoyed them, but I always dreamed of playing a game that told a real story, like a movie, only you could interact with it. Eventually, I discovered adventure games, but still, the puzzles got in the way of the story much of the time, and I have, I am sorry to say, only played two full-length adventure games I did not have to go online to find hints for.

This game, in case you didn't know, is a sequel of sorts to The Longest Journey (released in Europe in 1999, USA in 2000), one of the most succesful and acclaimed adventure games of the past ten years. TLJ told the story of a young art student named April Ryan, who discovered that she was chosen to save two worlds: Stark, the world of Science (our world), and Arcadia, the world of magic.

There was some suggestion that Dreamfall wouldn't really be a sequel and it wouldn't really be an adventure game, as it would feature action and stealth elements. After playing it, I would say that in some ways it is a sequel and in some ways it isn't, but it definitely is an adventure game, though not a traditional one.

I played The Longest Journey twice and liked it, so I was as eager as anyone to play Dreamfall. When I got it, I was soon sucked in, and enthralled, up to the already-infamous ending.

The story, as most people agree, is fantastic. It may use elements from other sources, but it makes them its own, just like the original Longest Journey did. I think Dreamfall does this better than the older game did, actually. It begins slowly, like The Longest Journey did, introducing us to the facts of life for the main character of the game, Zoe Castillo. She has recently dropped out of college and hangs around at home most of the time. At the beginning, she is watching TV when she sees a video of a little girl in a wintry landscape next to a black house, who says, "find her, save her". At first, Zoe shruggs it off, but as she goes about her business that day, she keeps seeing the video, which seems to be meant for her, and the message changes to "find April Ryan, save her". At the same time, Zoe's ex-boyfriend (who she's still friends with) asks her to do a favor for him, which turns deadly. Said ex-boyfriend then disappears, and Zoe begins a journey around the world (including the small neighborhood of Venice in Newport), and beyond, during which she discovers a huge corporate mind-control conspiracy (which just might be even more), and of course encounters April Ryan. (Unlike TLJ, there is no Cortez or anyone like that to tell Zoe what's going on and why she's needed. Zoe sets off on her own, and only finds out what's going on quite a ways into the story.)

You play as Zoe most of the time, but there are two other playable characters as well. One, of course, is April Ryan, who has grown bitter and disillusioned since the last game, and is now part of a rebellion against the Azadi, who drove out the Tyren from Marcuria after the last game, but then decided to stay and "help" the Northlands, which involves persecution of all magical races, laws against practicing magic, and the prohibition of all religions save their own. She claims to be through with the saving of the world, and to no longer be who she was ten years before, but the player may have doubts.

The third is Kian Alvane (yes, TLJ fans, you HAVE heard that name before) who is an Azadi Apostle (i. e. assasin), who is sent to eliminate one of the rebels, but finds himself questioning his country's actions in the Northlands, partly because of encounters with April. He is rather under-developed, though he is clearly being set up for future adventures.

The story, as you can probably tell, is quite complex and involving, and, I think, better paced and structured than that of The Longest Journey. The multiple characters thing helps to cover a lot of ground without fallling into loosely related episodes like the Longest Journey did. This is one of the best stories in gaming history, I think. It's certainly better than a lot of movies out there. Maybe the whole evil corporate conspiracy thing isn't exactly original, to say nothing of the rebellion-against-evil-empire thing, but it works well. And, anyway, The Longest Journey borrowed from a lot of things, too, in much more clumsy fashion. Those who think the story is confusing or stupid have been watching too much TV. It is certainly very different from The Longest Journey, in subject matter, and general feel, although the basic structure of both games is surprisingly similar.

As you can probably tell this game actually has THEMES! Primarilly, dreams and faith, by all possible definitions of both terms. April and Zoe both had plans for their lives that unravelled for different reasons, to which they responded in different ways (Zoe dropped out of college and everything else, April became angry and bitter, developed a death wish, and gave up what she DID have), but both need faith to carry on. Both are aware of how they have changed (Zoe repeatedly says that her current mood isn't her, and she doesn't like being that way, April says at one point "The April Ryan (Charlie and Emma) knew is dead", and later says "I'm not that girl anymore. I don't even remember what she was like"). But when the crisis in the game confronts them, they respond differently. Zoe accepts it, and decides to do what's right no matter what, first deciding to find Reza, then taking on the whole conspiricy (as she says, "I might not like the Zoe I was turning into, but I would hate the Zoe who didn't try to help her best friend"), whereas April resists and does her best to have nothing to do with it ("Not my problem. I'm through with your world. I have enough turmoil in my life already"), even though it keeps coming to her, and she may yet soften... Again, both need faith to live. I can relate to this, being in a similar place in my life myself. Faith in a more traditional sense is handled as well. The Azadi are set to dominate all of Arcadia, particularly the Northlands, out of religious zeal and dogmatsim similar to that of certain Muslims (As a conservative Christian, I must admit don't feel altogether comfortable with that part of the story. When will people realize that religion isn't inherently subjective, and that believing your religion is the objective truth doesn't make you a hate-filled zealot? And most of us DO question our faith on a regular basis! Also, the fact that the Azadi came to the Northlands to drive out the Tyren, and then stayed and ran the place, could be a veiled reference to the American occupation of Iraq. These things are subtly handled, however, and only caused even I minor annoyance.) This is focused in the character of Kian, who starts out believing what the rulers of the Azadi tell him without question, particularly regarding their mission to spread the light of the Goddess throughout the world (in other words, conquer it), but comes to question them after seeing the Northlands, and particularly a couple of encounters with April. Faith is also used as a girl's name, but I won't spoil that. Dreams are also a major theme. Without spoiling too much, I'll just say that they are central to the conspiracy, and Zoe has powers involving them.

If the plot may be somewhat derivative, the characters aren't. In some ways, Zoe is a lot like April was at the beginning of The Longest Journey: she's at college age, has some problems, but is mostly settled in her life, only to have everything disrupted by greater things. In other ways, however, she could not be more different. In TLJ, April was escaping from an unhappy childhood with her adopted family, and set on being an artist. Zoe, on the other hand, though her mother died (supposedly) when she was little, has a pretty good relationship with her father, has recently dropped out of college, lives at home, and doesn't know what to do with her life. She is more relaxed and introspective than April was, but has just as much attitude, in her own way. In an odd way, she looks like Chihiro from Spirited Away. As for April, she is much more edgy than she was before, having gone from slightly-ditzy-art-student to hardened-rebel-leader. She doesn't want to get involved in another big mess (which is understandable, since the last one basically ruined her life). Like Zoe, she doesn't know what to do with herself at the outset. As previously mentioned, she has become bitter and angry, and has developed a death wish. Under all this, however, she still seems to be the same person she was before, with the same sense of humour. This is helped by the fact that Sarah Hamilton reprises her role as April's voice While in The Longest Journey she changed outfits fairly often, in Dreamfall April is always dressed like Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings movies. She looks kind of like Charlize Theron did in Aeon Flux, which is appropriate. Kian, as previously mentioned, is somewhat underdeveloped, but he seems to be a decent fellow who has been indoctrinated with bad ideologies. (More on that later.) The supporting characters are no less. Zoe has two good friends, one male and one female, like April did, only they have more importance to the plot. Her friend Reza Temiz is the reason she gets involved in the whole thing in the first place, and Olivia DeMarco, who owns a computer store and is a hacker and general computer wizard, helps her get past locks and barriers, and other tech-oriented things many times over the course of the game; her role is similar to that of Burns Flipper in the first game. All the characters in the game have distinct personalities.

Great voice acting all round, particularly Zoe (Ellie Conrad Leigh), and April (Sarah Hamilton), but the supporting cast is just as good, and one of the great things is that the returning characters from TLJ (such as Crow, Benrime, and Charlie and Emma), are all voiced by the same actors from before. This is an aspect of the game that doesn't seem to have been criticized, and considering what voice acting in computer or video games of any kind usually is, this is really special.

The music is good as well. A lovely orchestral score, with a few U2-style pop songs that fit into the plot at crucial moments. No one has been complaining about this either.

Now for the technical stuff.

The graphics may not be anything to write home about from a technical standpoint (though they are superior to those of the last game), but, artistically, they are amazing. The character models are much better this time around as well, and some of the characters have real expressions.

Those of you who were consumed with frustration by the control system, I feel your pain. I was tempted to give up after a few minutes myself, but if you make some adjustments (lower the camera sensitivity, for example) and persevere, you'll get used to it eventually, and it IS worth it. I must agree with those who thing the controls could be better. Dreamfall is made in 3D, which is great for a cinematic effect, and its default control system is keyboard-and-mouse, which involves using the keyboard to move, and the mouse to look around, and is kind of uncomfortable. There is an all-mouse option as well, but it is hardly traditional, as it involves moving the mouse forward to move the character forward, and I never got used to it, or tried. Since it's possible to use a traditional point-and-click interface WITH a 3D environment, as games such as the Westerner and the Bone series have done, it seems a shame that they didn't include a system like that as an option. Maybe next time.

As for the much debated combat and stealth elements, they could be frustrating, so I was glad they weren't harder, but I would have liked to skip the action elements at least. The stealth elements could be kind of fun, though I did have to remember to constantly save my game, which was frustrating. I agree with those who think Funcom should improve them or remove them in the next game. Or both; they could have a refined combat and stealth system for those who want them, and the abiltiy to skip those sections for those who don't. In any case, they're very minor.

Which brings me to the gameplay. Many have complained that Dreamfall is really an interactive movie, rather than a game. I agree, but that's what I want, so I'm happy. I was happy to get through large portions of the game without hints, as well. For the puzzle people, I can see how it would be frustrating. I confess I would like to see a bit more emphasis on the "interactive" part myself. For example, before it came out, Ragnar Tornquist said there would be a lot of side quests and things. Unless he was referring to the fact that it's possible to do most things multiple ways, he let us down on that one. I'd been hoping for something like Morrowind, where you could go off on these little bunny-trails that had nothing to do with the main plot, and were completely optional, you could play through without knowing they existed, and also the ability to have the main plot proceed different ways. As it is, the game is really very linear. And there ARE huge chunks of cutscenes. More interactivity would be appreciated.

And now I come to the most controversial aspect of the game: the "ending", which, after only a few weeks of release, has already become infamous in adventure game circles, and understandably so. For those who ask if it's REALLY so shocking, depressing, and inconclusive as every one says, yes, it is. As I said, I was pulled into the drama and fantasy of Dreamfall, up to Chapter 10, when a certain something happened (you will know it when you see it, let's just say not only April and Kian, but Arcadia itself, basically disappear from the game), and things went downhill from there. (I had a similar experience with the original Longest Journey, though to a lesser extent.) Like many others, during the final cutscenes I was praying that it wouldn't end right there, hoping I wouldn't see the credits, but eventually I did, and I was filled with despair. Without going into details, let's just say that, similar to LucasArts's Monkey Island 2 (which Tornquist must have played), it gives you the impression that all you and the characters have done over the course of the game has been futile. And you still aren't even clear what's going on! The business about the little girl who appears to Zoe is wrapped up nicely, but that's it. Nothing else is.

When I finished, I was very depressed. The brief cutscene at the end of the credits gave me a little hope, but not much. I ended up talking about Dreamfall for most of my appointment with my therapist that day, as I had difficulty recalling the details of my own life. Later, I went to Ragnar Tornquist's blog, and discovered that he had intended Dreamfall to be part two of a trilogy, and part one of a two-part story. In other words, the ending is NOT a declaration of existential nihilism, just a cliffhanger, like The Empire Strikes Back. Actually, the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers, because after this game, no one will be able to bear a cliffhanger ending ever again, and will stage boycotts.

To sum things up, I loved this game. (whether it's really a game or not, I couldn't care less.) Sure, the gameplay had a fair deal to be desired, and the ending was traumatic, but no game has ever pulled me into a story and made me feel for the characters the way this one did. When you think about it, the trauma of the ending was a tribute to the story, because it made me CARE. I'm not quite sure how to rate it, if I could, I might give it 4.5 stars on both counts. As it is, I gave it four stars overall because there IS room for improvement.

Also, to look back on history, when Myst was released, it discarded many things that were du rigeur in adventure games at that time, and tried to bring it down to the basic essentials. There hadn't been anything like it before, and it was a huge hit, and then every body tried to copy it, which may well have contributed to the decline of the adventure genre. (Myst fan though I am, I must admit it.) Now the genre is starting to shake loose of the Myst stigma, and Dreamfall again tries to discard conventions and bring the adventure game down to its bare essentials, only the other way! In other words, it is the ultimate anti-Myst.

In short, if you're into puzzles, check out Schizm or Uru or something. If you're like me, and want to live a story (and don't suffer from extreme anxiety or depression), you can't go wrong with Dreamfall.

I hope that The Longest Journey 3 comes out before another six years, and that it features another wonderful interactive story, only with more emphasis on "interactive", improved controls, improved/removed action and stealth elements, and a real (preferably at least semi-happy) ending.

(It should be noted that the bad language that was so prevalent in The Longest Journey is still present, but there's much less of it.)

Playing this game for me was like reading a great book. When I finished the game I realized that I had been completely tied up in the plot and the few irking traits the game carries ultimately did not matter much: The controls are not great and the puzzles are not extraordinarily difficult.

For all of you adventure gamers the controls are similar to those of Grim Fandango. The graphics are great, but will not knock out your video card like Oblivian. The voice acting is absolutely superb.

Overall the plot plays out like a greek tragedy and, to me at least, the ending was great. At first I was disappointed, because the plot does concretely resolve itself, but after some reflection I found that it was much better that way. Instead to tying itself off and letting you go back to your own thoughts, the game leaves you to questioning everything that went on in the game and what implications there are for the future. In my opinion, this is what sets the game apart.

It has been discussed that, in our age, books are falling to tv/video games as the medium of choice. I do not particularly believe this, however, this game along with others like half-life 2 show that tv/video games are just as capable of addressing the great themes of life. They just need a bit of polishing, but the direction is right.

I would rank this game as one of my top 5 favorite along with the monkey island series, grim fandango, half-life series, and the old x-wing/tie fighter games. I would certainly recommend buying this game, I am currently replaying and taking in it's message a second time.