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Fantastic new addition.
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.
Completely breaking with my usual rules (and mostly thanks to this), I’m playing The Longest Journey, a 1999 adventure game that’s still absurdly refreshing to play. It’s fully voiced, very pretty, and has some of the best lines I’ve heard in video games. (The ones above are only a few of them.)
Thanks for visiting, we look forward to hearing from you.