Even if it might just be a variation of frequency illusion, I am somehow lucky enough to have been exposed to a lot of movies at the exactly right time in my life, when its themes describe my current situation relatively accurately. While there are examples of this happening to me with a videogames story, they are way fewer and far between, which might just be a consequence of the overall lower writing quality of the medium, as a factor of its still relatively short life.
I have not even been 20 years of age for a month and still feel, like probably most people around my age, lost in the world and unhappy with the situation I’ve currently found myself in. I have started going to university last winter semester, studying something I have little to no desire to pursue professionally, only because I couldn’t have sat around barely doing anything for another year, so you might be able to imagine my reaction after Dreamfall: The Longest Journey made me have this conversation during its opening.

If you’ve ever heard the name Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, you have probably also heard about its overall writing quality, which is for the most part deserved. The storyline Ragnar Tørnquist and his talented team managed to weave here is definitely above average for the medium, stringing together themes of being lost in your 20s and some good old anti-imperialism among others, definitely deserves its high praises, although without going into spoilers it did suffer from pacing irregularities at around the halfway point, Kian’s storyline feeling particularly half-baked, leaving you off with a few more unanswered questions at the end, than it should and (this is a gripe) overusing the trope of a character beginning to say something, just to correct themselves halfway through, as to not give away information they shouldn’t a bit too much. The voice acting was also a mixed bag, with some really great performances amongst some that unfortunately felt like they were just reading directly from the script, but it didn’t ever take away from the moments too much.

The gameplay, while not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination, felt fairly unique. You can definitely feel the series beginnings as point-and-click adventure games, but in 3D now, which made it feel like it was made during the fifth generation, rather than the sixth (positive), with how it tries to reinvent the genre with a new camera-perspective, even with it obviously not being the first to do so.
I really liked the ability to, after clicking down the left stick, being able to see every interactable object, which even without said ability still were well telegraphed. Behind the story, the old adventure aspects of the game are probably its biggest strong suit. Using and combining items to solve puzzles kept bringing me great joy over its around 12 hour runtime and can be traced back to the fact that the game sometimes allowed multiple solutions for a given problem, greatly improving the ways a player may express themselves. There was only ever one example of a puzzle I found to be unintuitive in chapter five, although I may have just missed a clue considering how good they went about it otherwise.

The game also pulled a classic from the sixth generation by randomly forcing you into very rudimentary stealth and combat encounters. While I found the stealth segments to serve as a fun break of pace most of the time, it still baffles me to think about why the combat system in particular was kept in. While the stealth scenarios, even with- or maybe because- of their low difficulty, made me think differently about the way I would go about the usual puzzle solving affair in the rooms they were featured in, every single fight would go down the exact same way. More specifically switching from regular to strong attacks in perpetuity for around 5-10 seconds, until the enemy is defeated. It also didn’t help expand the regular gameplay loop, as enemies defeated during combat sections, unlike their stealth counterparts, never dropped any objects, thus their existence was merely for spectacle, which (to come back to the beginning) is not a word I would use to describe it due to their completely rudimentary nature.

Keeping all this in mind Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is still highly recommended to anyone looking for a simpler experience in the gameplay department, packed with some great writing, and I for one am definitely excited to experience the rest of the series.

I bought this in krakow in tenth grade along with tomb raider: anniversary, and couldn't wait to get back home to play it. Turns out my computer couldn't handle the graphics, though, so the low frame rate ended up freezing me out of the game.

something about the vibes and the scenery, the music, i really wanted to play this. now my pc doesn't even have an optical drive for the disc, and i'm pretty sure it wouldn't work through that method of installing anyway. what the hell has this world come to.

Dreamfall, the 2006 follow-up to 1999's The Longest Journey, has all the charm and nostalgia of a mid-2000s Xbox game. It's a charm that's hard to articulate, but suffice it to say that the vibes throughout Dreamfall are immaculate. Unfortunately, though, the gameplay can leave a lot to be desired.

With a story that's arguably just as strong as its predecessor, Dreamfall propels you back into its setting a decade into the future. Such a significant time jump is jarring at first, but gradually being reintroduced to all of the legacy characters and seeing how they've changed and grown (if at all) in the past 10 years was really compelling.

The new protagonist this time around is Zoë Castillo, a truly charming and oh-so-relatable character. Having recently graduated from college and trapped in a listless routine with nothing to do or aspire towards, Zoë soon finds herself wrapped up in an all-too-familiar worldwide and inter-dimensional conspiracy that threatens the fate of the twin worlds.

There are also two other characters whose perspectives you switch to every now and then: April and Kian. While their stories are important to the proceedings (albeit in a lesser capacity), this is still very much Zoë's adventure. Switching between this trio was a neat excuse to switch up the dynamics of the story every now and then, but ultimately, April and Kian's arcs didn't add as much to the overall narrative as I would have liked.

At least, not yet. Thankfully, there's a third entry in this series awaiting me; otherwise, the wait for closure to this game's multiple cliffhangers would have been exhausting.

With all that being said, where the game is largely lacking is in its gameplay mechanics and systems. Namely, combat and stealth. Both of these add nothing more than frustrating distractions with absolutely no depth and barely, if any, challenge to them. They mostly serve to make the game feel less like a simple, by-the-books adventure where you interact with objects and talk to people. Honestly, though, if they just stuck to that, I really believe Dreamfall would have been better off for it.

Despite this, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey still manages to be a very solid entry into the series, let down by its deeply flawed gameplay but propped up by another great adventure filled with solid writing, compelling characters, and intriguing mysteries. Not to mention the soundtrack being really great and worth putting on your playlist(s).

7.5/10

Ну, лучше, чем первая часть, но...

...Всё равно сорта говна.

Да, Dreamfall лучше написана: сюжет подаётся более равномерно — игрока не насилуют одними загадками, чтобы потом грузить лором, а создают детективную интригу (почти успешно) и без излишних подробностей поясняют кто есть кто. Необязательно даже играть в первую часть.

Да, в Dreamfall уже не больно играть. Местные загадки настолько просты, что их и загадками назвать трудно. Большая их часть заключается в том, чтобы взять 1-2 доступных предмета на локации и применить в единственно возможном и очевидном месте.

Кроме того, игра переехала в полное тридэ. И кроме загадок нам завезли рудиментарный стэлс (примитивный до невозможности), убогие экшон эпизоды (атаки считываются с задержкой — и это единственная их сложность). Ещё на всю игру есть два вида мини-игр при взломе замков (простые, но утомительные).

А всё потому что по сути Dreamfall — кинцо. Большая часть «игры» это беготня из одного конца города в другой и просмотр заставок. Вот только графика для 2006-го страшновата, мир порублен на куски коротенькими, но всё же загрузками между малюсенькими локациями, а история...

История заканчивается ничем! В конце игры, когда кажется, что вот сейчас начнут отвечать на вопросы, которые всё время только копились, тебе вкидывают ещё вопросов, клиффхэнгеров и внезапных поворотов и пускают титры!

Поэтому как оценивать это чудо неясно. С одной стороны, играть не больно, но и геймплея толком нет. История написана лучше, формально даже продолжает первую часть, но концовку не завезли.

Короче, я опять не понял почему в интернете так высоко оценили ещё одну игру.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was released in 2006, a good seven years after the original game and into a very different gaming landscape. Classic click 'n' point adventures games had sung their formal swansong years earlier and now only existed in the dreams of random central-European bedroom developers, and the world was still several years away from both the genre's transformation into more narrative and choice-focused stories and the Kickstarter revival of the genre's old conventions. The gaming market in general had shifted its focus to consoles and attracting mass markets and so developing a PC-only adventure game was basically a guaranteed commercial suicide at this point. In all honesty and sympathy Funcom didn't have an easy task ahead of them after they finally felt ready to revisit the story. They had to reinvent the basic gameplay loop to make it more marketable, adapt it into an entirely different 3D-based and gamepad-oriented standard, and narratively pull something out of the bag that would not just act as a satisfactory continuation for the old fans who were desperate to return to Stark and Arcadia, but which would also attract any newcomers who had in all likelihood never even heard of The Longest Journey.

In what is an incredible hat trick move for the ages, Dreamfall stumbles with each and every aspect of the above, and replaying it has only made it more obvious.

The most glaring problem Dreamfall has is that it simply isn't exciting or fun to play. Rather than solving puzzles by clicking around in a 2D scenery, you now control your character (one of three protagonists - I'll get to that) directly through a 3rd person perspective in a 3D environment, and at first everything seems OK and familiar even if it looks different: you've still got an inventory, the primary character Zoë has a journal like April did and games like Gabriel Knight 3 and Grim Fandango had proven that the genre could not only translate to a 3D environment well but take advantage of the new dimension as well, the former in its freewheeling camera that made detective work more detective-y and the latter embracing its blocky 1998 3D aesthetics to create one of the most memorable worlds in the genre. Dreamfall doesn't do anything like that and it doesn't even attempt to: despite the new possibilities, Funcom strip down gameplay elements and this makes the game so linear that it's actually frustrating to play. The puzzles are perfunctory and roughly 95% of them boil down to the player interacting with an environmental object in one room, going to an adjacent room to pick up an item, and then using that item on the object. They take about 30 seconds to complete and feel like needless busywork to give the illusion that Dreamfall is an old-school puzzler; sometimes you even get to combine items (woo!), but even the separate parts can typically be found literally next to one another and so your job is to simply spend a few seconds in the menu before you can advance. The puzzles are so simple that halfway through I actually wished they weren't there to begin with, because all they do is slow down the narrative for no real reason - tasks to tick on a chore list before you get to play the game, highlighting the difference between easy puzzles and needless admin. Outside the """puzzles""" the gameplay consists of running around from one screen to the next, finding the next piece of spelled-out busywork to process or the next dialogue tree to navigate. The tedium is sometimes broken by minigames, one for lockpicking (actually decent) and hacking (as tedious as its narrative justification is contrived), everyone's favourite trend stealth sections (awkward and frustrating) and - in what is the most baffling decision - actual combat sequences. The infrequent brawling in the game feels like a precisely engineered dictionary example of a forced action mechanic that has been included purely for marketing purposes, forced by a publisher because of a hypothetical market increase. It is quite possibly the worst tacked-on combat element I've ever seen in a game but on the bright side it's also so easy thanks to its mindnumbing simplicity and bad AI that the only thing slowing the player down is waiting for the next wave to start.

You can also tell that Funcom were struggling with the development of the game in general. The mid-2000s were a particularly awkward time for PC gaming because of the demands set by the the massively expanded console market, and the hardware and control limitations of the Playstation and XBox compared to the PC could really mess with gaming studios who had formerly only ever developed with the PC audience in mind. At the time this was called consolitis and though the term reeks of PC gaming master race subreddits, behind the unfortunate name lies a genuine phenomenon describing botched attempts of concept and design streamlining when dealing with perhaps unexpected technical restrictions. Dreamfall may as well be the shining example of the consolitis era (together with Deus Ex: Invisible War) given how full it is of the traditional hallmarks of the syndrome. The already cramped gameplay areas are segmented to countless small zones where you spend as much time staring at loading screens as you do on travelsal, there's minimal interactivity within the environment itself that leads to an eery feeling of ghost towns and meaningless NPCs, and the menus are all super-sized yet at the same time lacking in actual information. The grand fantasy metropolis of Marcuria feels smaller in this game than it did in TLJ despite the possibilities the extra dimension could allow because it's been split into claustrophobic corridors full of artificial blocks, all its small sectors coming across hollow and devoid of life. The aforementioned journal that Zoë keeps is more of a microblog with a strict character limit and the emotional resonance of a "Hello Twitter, today I ate eggs for breakfast" style microblog, which is simply compared to April's lengthy journal rambles about her experiences in TLJ.

In summary, if The Longest Journey was an epic adventure that felt larger than life and conjured the most incredible vistas and scenes, Dreamfall behaves like you are walking the same three corridors each day and occasionally hearing someone in another room talk about the rest of the building, which you can't access because the stairways are blocked with ankle-high boxes, all the doors are locked and you're chained to the handrail.

This could be saved by the plot - after all, there are many great hyperlinear narrative adventures where you don't even detect the restrictions because the story is so captivating. To Funcom's credit, Dreamfall starts out very well and despite the gameplay interruptions, the game's initial narrative is a decent hook. Rather than directly continuing April Ryan's story, Dreamfall takes place some years after and introduces the recently ex-boyfriended university dropout Zoë Castillo who struggles to find meaning and focus in her life (and my gods is she going through textbook depression but the game very nicely doesn't awkwardly hammer this in so the player definitely gets it). Zoë's story arc starts small but despite some contrivances (her hacker friend is way too convenient and one-dimensional to ever feel like anything more than a gameplay proxy), her stumbling onto something far bigger than she can at first even comprehend soon begins to weave old familiar themes (and worlds and people) and new ideas together in a manner that compells, even on a replay (though I had forgotten some of the detail, once more). That is, at least, if you're a TLJ veteran, which is the perspective I'm coming from: the writing doesn't do a particularly good job of treating newcomers as well as it does veterans, and particular aspects (primarily most things Arcadia and some of the major characters and themes of April's original story) are never explained thoroughly enough so that someone new to the series could have a full grasp of what's happening and why.

You meet and get to play as April too, now almost a new character after a decade of feeling lost both physically and mentally following the events of TLJ but somewhere inside that gruff demeanour is something recognisable.

Then things start falling apart little by little. The further you dwell in the (mostly) Stark-side plot with Zoë the more it becomes a sequence of conspiracy clichés and seemingly random curveballs that are barely explained: there's ghost girls, corporate espionage action sequences, global conspiracies, secret pasts, corrupt megacorps etc. Eventually you lose track of what you're meant to actually pay attention on, and Zoë's character (and acting) seems to get less engaged the more you play and the more Zoë is meant to be focused on finding the answers to all the questions around her. While Zoë gets to visit Arcadia a couple of times, most of the time spent in the world of magic is split between the other two characters. April returns and after a decade wandering without meaning both mentally and physically following the events of TLJ, her initial gruff but still recognisably April demeanour transforms into a one-note, out-of-character nihilistic angst that torpedoes any dialogue she engages in. The third character, the religious zealot Kian who represents the foreign military might who has occupied Marcuria and which acts as the game's main antagonist faction, begins to appear more prominently from halfway point onwards and represents the lowest of the game's lows. He has the personality, presence and acting of a balsa wood chair, his story sequences feature the most action sequences out of all the characters and even though you can predict every single story beat of his arc the journey through it is still executed so haphazardly that it feels completely illogical and pulled out of thin air. Sometimes the wider issues of the game even end up affecting the narrative, as the different characters find themselves in the same recycled environments in Arcadia over and over again in what feels like contrivance dictated by asset reusage over any real narrative reason.

Much like TLJ Dreamfall does build to an emotional gut punch ending, which I vividly remembered completely throwing me off emotionally when I was younger and which haunted my mind for several days after the game finished. Without saying much more, it is still in some ways a very moving ending - but I didn't find it so powerful this time around because all I kept thinking is how badly the narrative ends if this is the only entry you'll ever play. Dreamfall is the middle part of a trilogy and like all the worst middle parts, it fires off oh so many cliffhangers and raises oh so many questions in the final stretches towards its credits roll, all of which are left unanswered and which leaves a bad taste in the mouth even as the game cranks up the emotional heft of the narrative in its last chapters. The power of the poignant ending is left dulled and dampened when you realise just how many central elements of the entire game so far had been left completely blank, when for half the game you don't know why you're doing something or what it is you're even doing to begin.

This is probably the third time I've played Dreamfall and each time I come away from it with more hesitations. Once the novelty - the return to the familiar things from the first game (particularly powerful if you had been aware of the original since 1999), experiencing the new plot for the first time, etc - has worn off, you start paying attention to everything else and you begin to see the holes. The plot and the characters are inconsistent and the gameplay is subpar, and once those start jumping on your face it's hard to pay attention to the good parts. Dreamfall straddles the fine line between bad and boring - it's an honestly middling gameplay experience and ultimately unsuccessful in most of its goals. It's a game that's going through a major identity crisis in so many ways, by developers who seemed to be second guessing what they wanted to achieve with this entry while also planning threads towards the next one, before they could even confirm there was ever going to be a third part. In my books, Dreamfall is one of the worst stumbles in quality within a series, the likes of which are rare to find to this extent.

This game series is simply amazing! I will say, it fell a bit short at the end and changing focus from April Ryan to someone we've never even heard about, Zoe. That being said, she is still a great and interesting character. The ending just makes me want to buy the newest game right now and damn the consequences for not having the money!

Now the game itself is very different from it's prequel. this game is not point-and-click, but it has many of it's elements. You walk around using WSDA and select highlighted objects when you get close to them and use your mouse. You also have the item combination ability too, to solve the various puzzles in the game.

What surprised me the most when I had it loaded up and waited to see scenes from the gameplay, is that there is a combat mechanic in the game. Not vital (as you can still use your brain or talk/sneak your way around situations instead), but a very interesting addition as it gives you more options as to what paths to go down.

Well worth the purchase if you own the first game and if you don't, you better get the first game before this!

I imagine this was quite a polarising game for anyone that was a fan of The Longest Journey. While TLJ was a traditional point & click adventure, even down to having some hugely cryptic and irrational puzzle solutions, Dreamfall took a far more casual approach. While there is still some (fairly basic) puzzle solving to be had, this direct sequel to one of the greatest games of all time shifts more into interactive movie territory. You as the player are mostly there to push the story along, to chat to folks (a lot!) and to take in the sublimely atmospheric worlds of Stark and Arcadia. This is a game with a lot of attention and craft applied to its cast and locales and overall presentation. For that reason I loved it, and was quite happy to endure the simplistic gameplay and shoehorned-in-but-mercifully-rare combat encounters.

An absolute treat for anyone who values escapism in video games.

Good story, strong characters, some of the worst fighting mechanics I've ever engaged with, Dreamfall is a noticeable step down from the first title in the series.

People play the Dreamfall series for the story, and I think the world here is super interesting, but the storytelling here didn't hold my interest as much as The Longest Journey did. There's too much running around IMO, and the multiple perspectives aren't balanced as well as they could have been. The environmental world building is very good however, each place feels distinct and lived in.

Very clearly act two in a three act narrative, I'm very much looking forward to Dreamfall: Chapters. There's a lot of interesting ways this story could go and I'm intrigued to see where it ends up!