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dkirschner's Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (PC)
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| [January 21, 2014 11:27:33 AM]
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Burned through this over the long weekend. Interesting game. I enjoyed it overall, probably give it like a 70 or 75%. The biggest thing the Longest Journey games have going for them are the stories. The stories in both were really neat, this mixture of sci-fi and fantasy. The first game set up the whole mythos of the world(s). This one uses that as a backdrop for exploring perhaps some moral question about the implications of technology, our dependence on it, our overuse (?) of it. There are also clear parallels in the story to current events about terrorism, foreign military occupation, religious freedom and oppression and so on. It's cool how so much social commentary was wrapped up in one story.
Unfortunately though, the end was really really disappointing! There were a lot of plot lines running through the game and they simply weren't wrapped up adequately. Here are some questions off the top of my head about things that were left unresolved. These things were not just "open-ended" for the player to think about, but totally unresolved. (1) Uhh, April Ryan? There's no way she died like she did. So what happened to her? (2) The entire Arcadia plot is left hanging. What happened to the rebels in Arcadia? What happened with the Azadi and the occupation of Marcuria? What happened with the tower that seemed to be such a big deal throughout the game? (3) What happened to all the characters I encountered throughout the game? Crow? The White Dragon? The innkeeper? The freaking playable character Apostle? How was a character you spend a couple hours with just dropped completely? These characters were far too important to never mention again. Then of course there were requisite cliffhangers that set up a sequel, like "That's not really Reza!" at the end. Oooh, then who is it?! Despite that mysterious line though, there was no hint of or any previous instance of people not being who they appear, so mysterious or not, I don't know where that came from. Regardless, there is plenty of material for more related stories to be told.
I found the third-person perspective much more engaging than the landscaped point-and-click of The Longest Journey. It's nice to be able to run around in a world and explore a bit, see the sights as your character sees them. None of the environments were particularly mind-blowing, but I did like the cityscape of Zoe's home, as well as the city of the Dark People. That place looked awesome.
So with the third-person perspective, they went on and committed to a more action game feel and added fighting and stealth portions to the game. Both were...functional. They didn't...not work. But they were ridiculously simple and, the fighting especially, didn't need to be there. Here's how you fight in Dreamfall: left mouse is light attack, right mouse is strong attack, space is block, move while blocking dodges. That's it. So you just stand there, dodge when an enemy strong attacks, and strong attack it back a few times, and you win pretty much every fight without any trouble. And you only fight random goons, and only one at a time, sometimes with two in a row. And you only fight maybe 10 people in the entire game. Like, completely pointless. The stealth was better. There are some segments where you're infiltrating some headquarters and whatnot, and there are sentry robots in the game. You have to go about your mission while avoiding the robots. You can sneak and hide behind walls to wait for an enemy to pass. Simple, but the stealth made a lot more sense than the fighting.
Puzzles in Dreamfall are the complete opposite of The Longest Journey. Where the latter's were overly complicated, the former's are simplified. Instead of the 20 inventory items I always seemed to have in TLJ, I usually had 2-3 in Dreamfall. There are less inventory item puzzles and more puzzles in the world. Like I said, none were very difficult. I think it must be hard to design puzzles in games because there are so many different types of puzzles that players will recognize. Dreamfall definitely used puzzles I'd seen before. One was just an object-matching thing where you have say 5 shapes on the bottom of the screen. Then there is a grid with like 30 similar shapes on the screen and you have to find and click the ones that match the shapes on the bottom. They added a timer, so you have to do it quickly. Just shape recognition. There was another of the type where you have 4 dials and you have to match shapes on each dial. But when you turn the dials, some shapes get "captured" by the adjacent dial, so you have to just manipulate the dials so that the desired shapes get in the desired spots. Not very difficult, but enjoyable, those.
Yeah so that's that one. Not a bad game. I enjoyed playing it. It felt very safe.
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dkirschner's Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Friday 17 January, 2014
GameLog closed on: Monday 20 January, 2014 |
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This is the only GameLog for Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. |
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