I was in a Sci-Fi + Fantasy mood recently so I grabbed this promising title in my backlog. I had played through the The Longest Journey not too long ago and was looking forward to experiencing the dual worlds of Stark and Arcadia once more. (Some spoilers ahead)
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is the 2006 sequel to Funcom’s 1999 game: The Longest Journey. The third game in the series, Dreamfall: Chapters, was episodically released from 2014 to 2017. Now that I’ve established precisely which game I’m talking about here, I can get on with the review.
Story
Dreamfall mostly revolves around Zoë Castillo. Zoë is suffering from mild depression and lethargy at her home in future Casablanca when she meets up with her former love and current best friend, Reza Temiz.
Reza is an investigative journalist and he’s onto something big. So naturally, he disappears as soon as Zoë picks up a package for him. Some police interrogation and a programmed voice message later and Zoë is off on a (two) globe-trotting investigation to save her used-to-be-boyfriend!
Meanwhile, in Arcadia…
Oh right, some backstory from The Longest Journey. There are two worlds, Earth/Stark and Arcadia. In prehistory, they were one world but people were too power-hungry so the Dragons helped the sages split the world (universe?) in two. Earth/Stark is the world of physics and technology and Arcadia is the world of magic. The worlds are magically connected via dreams and kept in balance by the Guardian of the Balance. Got all that?
So when not controlling Zoë; the player guides one of two opposed characters in Arcadia. April Ryan (the protagonist of the previous game) is working with a resistance force against the Azadi military occupation of the Northlands. Kian Alvane (an Apostle of the Azadi), has been sent to said Northlands to bring the Light of the Goddess to one of the resistance leaders… by killing him.
Everything I’ve mentioned (and more) is only the first hour or so. And Dreamfall is not a short game. I recommend reading the backstory in the manual (gasp!) to get the full picture.
Gameplay
As an adventure game, Dreamfall is incredibly linear. Even though you have full control over the characters in the game; everything you do has to be done in a very specific order. Additionally; the characters, the items, and your mobile tell you exactly what you need to do when you need to do it.
There are some clever framing devices in some of these fetch quests but, besides that, the game is mostly a string of requests to talk to this person, pick up this item, go here, and give that person this item.
Zoë does get to pick two different types of locks (represented as techno puzzles) to break up the monotony. These are only used a half-dozen times combined but are satisfying to solve. There’s only a couple other “real” puzzles in the game, the rest of the game is dedicated to the story.
Something the game does really well is hotspot highlighting. Hotspots are interactable based on proximity. But Dreamfall also has a “focus field” that throws a blue line-of-sight down the direction the current character is facing; highlighting all interactable objects it crosses.
This is really great. I am a big proponent of hotspot highlighting and this is probably the best implementation of such a system I’ve ever seen in a 3D adventure game. It’s intuitive and it always works. It’s a shame that most of the game doesn’t have the density to really need this functionality.
On the other hand; there is also combat. And not clever, adventure game combat like in The Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island, or… Jack Keane 2. This is heavy attack, light attack, block, and dodge combat. And it feels awful.
Luckily, the required fights are really easy and the optional or failure state fights can be stealthed past or avoided.
Graphics
The game looks quite good, considering the game came out in 2006. Graphics scale up rather nicely and all of your graphic card’s resolutions should be supported. There are some impressive vistas but individual areas are pretty small and broken up by lots of loading screens. This is less of a problem nowadays thanks to our high speed hard drives and SSDs but still noticeable.
One of my biggest annoyances with the game is the general stiffness of the characters’ animations. Action posing was fine as were the general walk and run cycles. But for a game with this much dialogue; it is really disappointing to see just how little the characters’ emote.
Annoyances and DPD
There weren’t too many annoyances or instances of DPD in Dreamfall. Partially because the game is so linear with practically no puzzles for the time involved.
There is one puzzle that involves hitting three symbols to produce four notes. Unfortunately, the solution here is a song that is only played once. If you don’t remember it (when there’s no indication it’s important) or don’t have a save before the song, you’re going to be seriously stuck. I ended up having to metagame and brute force this one.
Besides that; I was never lost during my playthrough. At the same time, I was never challenged to think.
There is also a known bug where Zoë and one of her allies gets stuck walking through a door during a cutscene. This is easily fixed by either alt-tabbing back and forth or taking a Steam screenshot. I dare say it was quite funny.
Conclusion
The game suffers from being a sequel and it feels very much like the second book in a trilogy. it leans heavily on the previous game for lore and it leans on the sequel to resolve the (not small) cliffhangers.
Despite my gripes; I quite enjoyed this one. I think the espionage and the dream narratives work really well; only the Arcadia storylines are a bit weak.
I just wish that the game wasn’t so obviously linear and that it involved more actual puzzles, instead of always giving me the key to the next lock.
I highly recommend using a gamepad to play Dreamfall. The game was originally released on the XBox so it’s literally made for controllers. On keyboard + mouse, the control scheme feels weird and awkward even with full rebinding support.
Once I switched to gamepad controls, the game played really well. I’d like to play more adventure games like this.
What I played: 13 hours to finish the story.
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is property of Funcom. it is available on GOG, Steam and The Humble Store.