Played: The Longest Journey
I have a love-hate relationship with puzzle-based adventure games. On the one hand, they tend to have incredibly inventive stories (nothing like a slow, linear narrative to get into detail), but at the same time it’s really easy to create awful puzzles. That’s why games like Portal are such a huge success, because they do puzzles well - there’s enough of a jump from common sense to the solution for it to feel satisfying, but it’s a comfortable gap rather than a sprawling chasm. The Monkey Island games - brilliantly satisfying for their stories, by the way - have dozens of chasms. This game only has a few, but they’re painfully annoying when they crop up.
Story-wise, The Longest Journey is fantastic. There are mechanics that haven’t aged that well, and it’s easy to get restless watching a character run at a glacial pace from one side of the screen to another, but at the same time there’s a sprawling story, characters that far surpass a lot of current ones, and a stellar voice cast. It’s worth playing the sequel, Dreamfall, first, though - not just because it’s more comfortable to play, but because the knowledge you get from playing it makes absorbing such a rich universe that little less daunting.
Oh, and there are still four days left to back the Dreamfall Chapters Kickstarter, and you should do that now.