The Longest Journey

released on Nov 19, 1999

The Longest Journey is an amazing graphical adventure, where the player controls the protagonist, April Ryan, on her journey between parallel universes. Embark on an exciting and original journey of discovery, where you will explore, solve puzzles, meet new people, face terrifying monsters, learn, grow, and live the adventure of a lifetime!


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One of the most beautiful and well-written games I've played in my life. Genuine tears were streaming down my face when I finished the epilogue. I haven't played many point-and-click adventure games: only the ones by Humongous Entertainment and Sam & Max, so randomly picking up this game that was super cheap during the steam sale and having it be one of the best pieces of media I've experienced in my life was an insanely pleasant surprise.

The Longest Journey, without going into too many spoilers, is a story about April Ryan, and her connection between the two worlds: Stark (the world of science and law) and Arcadia (the world of magic and chaos). Throughout the story, through April, you travel and experience the struggles of abuse, political censorship, and if war can ever truly be "just". You meet strange people, animals, and mystical creatures that help you along your journey to help reconnect the seperated worlds. Every character is so well thought-out and truly personal, it feels like you're properly meeting someone who has gone through so much in life, their skin moist with the sweat of real fears and missed dreams. Something personal to me that I really enjoyed was the crazy amount of strongly written female characters, ranging from our relatable but brave girl protag, to the realistic and openly accepted lesbian couple, to the old women whose tales we must trust more than our own self. I appreciate that the serious times of the game are allowed their moments, while also having many silly moments that know when to be separate. I went in expecting to hate Crow, as an example, but you don't see him too often for him to become annoying, and when you do see him, it feels like a breath of fresh air to hear his dumb, silly banter. The story is set up perfectly, and clearly had a lot of time and love put into it, with it being absolutely perfectly paced, and one of the better examples of using the Chekhov's Gun trope that I can think of.

My compliants are small, and just involve stuff that old point-and-clicks almost always do, such as having a couple confusing puzzles or actions to continue the story, but for a point-and-click as long and complicated as The Longest Journey I was pretty shocked how few "dead-ends" I ran into. The game also crashed a bit, but I guess it's to be expected when running an older PC game on a modern computer, and I mostly only really had issues with crashes when it didn't mix well with OBS.

The Longest Journey is $3 during the Steam sale - I've already bought and gifted it to 5 of my friends, begging them to put time aside and play this game. It's not going to be a game that touches everyone as emotionally as it touched me, but if you have $3 lying around and 25+ hours to spend, please please give it a chance...

This is the story of the Longest Journey, and I told it in my own words, as told to me by my teacher. As we will continue to tell for many, many years.

5/5

Yet another go at playing through this, and this time it's being done with very little setup difficulty through ScummVM. It looks great with the HD mod, and plays very well.

This game just amazes me. It's such a classic and the CGI, though dated by today's standard, is still impressive for the time it came out. It's an amazing point-and-click with a beautiful and flowing narrative.

I am amazed that it hasn't gotten more recognition over the years and not as well known as some of those classics like Monkey Island and Sam & Max.

My only real issue is that some parts are a little difficult, but the items glow if you have to use them on a certain object or person which can be a real life-saver. I also dislike the fact I had to disable the steam UI to have it work (though that was sometime ago and it might work ok now) so there aren't any chances to take screenshots to show friends some of the awesome scenes and enlightening words of wisdom that are often spoken in this game.

If you're a fan of point-and-click and you for some reason don't have this in your collection then I don't know why you haven't bought this yet. Especially for it's price and what you get.

This game has some pacing problems, and some really obtuse puzzles, not to mention far too much dialogue at points, but, dammit, you know what? I absolutely love it; it's an absolute event of a game and, for better or for worse, really demonstrates what the adventure game genre is capable of