Storytime

It's probably appropriate for such a twisty series like Dreamfall / The Longest Journey that I would finish in the middle. I started by playing the last entry, Dreamfall Chapters, followed that up with the first game, The Longest Journey, and just now wrapped up the connecting piece, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey.

I enjoyed it a lot, but it's definitely the roughest entry in the game. That's almost entirely due to the technological limitations of its era: if I'd played it when it was first released in 2006, I probably would have been impressed by its visual design and cut-scenes; seeing it for the first time now, I'm instead mostly focused on the low polygon count and low-resolution textures. I'll complain about the tech for a while, but I should note up top that all of these issues are very easy to get past, and the underlying story and game is still great!

The game was originally released on the Xbox, and I think that drove a lot of the limitations. The game is technically more advanced than The Longest Journey: in particular, the characters are much less blocky-looking and are capable of nuanced facial expressions. The first thing you notice while playing Dreamfall is just how small each zone is, which means lots and lots of loading screens as you move around. On modern hardware, the load times are also very quick, so it isn't too annoying, but it does make the game feel really dated, and also draws more attention to how many of the quests have an annoying back-and-forth cadence: talk to a person, get the quest, go to the place, learn a thing, return to the person, get an item, return to the place, use an item, return to the person, learn a thing, return to the place, do a thing. None of that is hard or puzzle-y, and you'll see several dozen loading screens en route.

The console heritage shows itself in many ways, and Dreamfall feels like a fundamentally different type of game. The Longest Journey used a 3D engine, but was firmly in the legacy of point-and-click adventure games: there was always a fixed camera, often with a fun and unique perspective on the scene, you moved to a destination by clicking on it, and you used your mouse extensively to examine the environment and interact with items. Dreamfall (like Chapters) has a fully 3D environment and uses a behind-the-shoulders third-person camera that follows you around. The setting is still detailed and often beautiful, but does not feel nearly as artistic as TLJ did.

The controls were clearly made with a gamepad in mind, and can feel really awkward for a keyboard-and-mouse player. I had to invert the mouse axes to even make the game playable; I don't remember the last time I played a game with a third-person camera where dragging my mouse left would cause the character to look to the right. You can look up and down, but only like ten or fifteen degrees in each direction; frustratingly, particularly late in the game you're often up high above roaming enemies, and it's literally impossible to pan the camera down and see where they are. The game also has some unusual and obscure controls, like a "look at a distance" mode, which seems superfluous, up until the moment many hours later when it's necessary to proceed with the game.

Probably the most bizarre evolution from TLJ is the addition of a combat mode: every now and then you get a health bar and spar off against a series of attacking enemies. This is not done well: it's clunky and unresponsive, with you often left facing the wrong direction. The principle behind the combat seems to be a perfectly fine rock-paper-scissors design: blocking lets you bypass light attacks, light attack land before a heavy attack, and heavy attacks can break through blocks, but there doesn't seem to be any telegraphing of moves that would make the system compelling. Fortunately, the designers seem to have realized that combat isn't great, so it isn't a major element of the game. There isn't much to start off with, you can bypass much of it by sneaking or dialogue, and when you do get into a fight, it is inevitably kind of easy: just make sure you're facing the enemy and then mash heavy attacks until you win. I'm very glad that they decided to drop this element from the sequel.

The puzzles themselves also felt frustrating. I don't recall ever getting stuck in Chapters, and I only had to look up two or three things in TLJ, but I frequently needed to consult walkthroughs for Dreamfall, despite it being shorter than either of the other games. Oftentimes it turned out that there was some dumb mechanical thing I needed to do, but there were also many times when the actual puzzle was just baffling; some particular offenders included a puzzle that requires you to replicate a melody that you heard once before but can't re-listen-to without reloading a previous save, and a frustrating puzzle built around wheels and statues that I still don't understand even after following a walkthrough.

Let's see, I think that's all I have to complain about. On to the good stuff!

As with TLJ, the character animations seem ahead of their era and more than make up for the technical deficiencies in polygon count. Voice acting is also superb and helps you fall in love with these people. The music is done well, though I do kind of wish there was more of it; I do like how the music is integrated into the storyline and becomes interesting in its own right.

The inventory system is a lot lighter than in TLJ, which was also pretty light in comparison to classic 90s adventure games, which I think is a good thing: there are long stretches of the game where you don't have anything at all in your inventory, so there isn't even the temptation to start randomly combining items and using them on every possible thing in the environment to try to advance. Speaking of combining, I think there are just like one or maybe two times in the whole game when you need to combine inventory items, and it's pretty obvious when you need to do that.

While the combat system is tedious, stealth is pretty good. It's generally sensible, based on you crouching, moving in shadows, staying out of characters' line of sight, and being mindful of loud surfaces like broken glass. I also enjoyed the hacking and lockpicking minigames; these sorts of minigames are never great, but I thought these were better than most, particularly the lockpicking one. Hacking did sometimes get tedious in the later game when the puzzles get long and the timer felt too short, but there's no penalty for failure and eventually you'll get a successful run.

Of course, the big draw of this series isn't the technology or even the gameplay, it's the story and characters.

MINI SPOILERS

Here too there are some big changes from TLJ. Instead of playing as a single protagonist for the entire game, you control a variety of people. Slightly more than half of the time you play as Zoe Castillo, a bored but compassionate rich girl who get caught up in a whirl of events. I enjoyed playing as Zoe quite a lot, which I'm sure was helped by having played as her before in Dreamfall Chapters: she's extremely likeable, fairly low-key but determined, honest and resourceful. I don't think she's quite as interesting or compelling as April was; she's slightly more bland, less opinionated, funny but not as sharp as April. Continuing with my eternal mission to compare everything to Life Is Strange, I felt some echoes of the Max->Chloe transition in the April->Zoe transition; Zoe is nothing at all like Chloe personality-wise, but visually they do seem to echo each other, appearing early on in a hoodie, and donning a beanie after coming into their own; both of them are also rather lanky and confident.

We do get to play as April too, which is fun and interesting. Her life has been hard since the end of TLJ, and we're seeing the end of several years of bitterness: she still has the old spark, but is much angrier now, with an unfamiliar ruthless edge replacing her earlier wide-eyed wonder.

We also get to play as Kian Alvane, the Azadi Apostle from Sadir. Here too it was interesting to pick him up at the beginning after seeing his story end in Chapters. It feels intriguing to play as an adversary of another player character, and really compelling to operate from another literal perspective and point of view; this is played off to some great intense effect, particularly in scenes where you alternate control between two foes as they debate one another, or when you witness the same events from multiple sources.

And the last is the first: at the very start of the game's prologue, you get to play as Brian Westhouse, and witness the event that kicked off so much. This is yet another case where knowing the revelations of Chapters adds more tension to what we see in the previous entries, and makes me feel impressed at how much of this far-flung series was planned out at the start.

Several other characters return from the first game, almost all on the Arcadia side: the innkeeper, and even Roeper Klacks, delightfully transformed as a result of his defeat in the first game. It feels really nice to return to Marcuria, even though the section of the city we can now explore seems far smaller than before, and there are far fewer lands beyond the city wall to visit. Politically, the Tyrenese horde that threatened Marcuria in the first game has been defeated by the Azadi, who then set up military occupation of the city and began to proselytize their faith.

The Azadi are really interesting for many reasons. Visually, it's striking that the main Azadi ethnic group from Sadir seem to be dark-skinned, a literal contrast with the lighter-skinned inhabitants of Marcuria. My knee-jerk reaction is to go, "Yikes, you're making the 'bad guys' all black?!" But of course it's more interesting than that. When's the last time that a fantasy race of technologically superior empire-building imperials were depicted with dark skin? (Which, of course, has plenty of precedent in our own world, particularly in places like Egypt and Mali.) And Kian in particular helps us see that the Empire is complex and heterogeneous, with various factions vying against one another and using the resources of the state for good or ill.

The Azadi are also interesting in that they are very pro-religion and simultaneously very anti-magic; I think that in most fantasy those two things are usually depicted as directly correlated. They believe deeply in their goddess and their faith propels and motivates them, but it doesn't, like, give them access to clerical spells to cast lightning at their foes or anything.

The occupation in particular is a very fraught and loaded dilemma. It's impossible for me to hear April chastising Kian without me thinking that this is an allegory of America's occupation of Iraq. Yes, the Azadi defeated an evil oppressor, liberated the people, brought their superior technology and built new infrastructure. But they worship a foreign god(dess), have removed their subjects' sovereignty, and look with disdain on indigenous practices. There's a tension that cuts both ways, with the Azadi feeling that the Marcurians are insufficiently grateful for all that the Azadi have done, while the Marcurians just want the Azadi to leave and let them pursue their own destiny.

There have also been big changes in Stark: Ten years have passed since the first game, which seems to have kicked off what's now known as "The Collapse", a brief period where their equivalent of the Internet went down for some time, there was widespread chaos and death, and then society came back online, now under the firm control of an omnipresent law enforcement group called The Eye. We still have a couple of familiar faces and locations, almost entirely in the Newport neighborhood of Venice. It looks a lot grimmer and grimier now; it never really recovered from the Collapse, and the streets have been claimed by gangs and the drug trade. But it looks really cool, in a down-trodden way, with the sleazy neon signs lending a cyberpunk air to the proceedings.

I was kind of surprised by just how happy I was to see Charlie again; I didn't have strong opinions about him one way or another in TLJ, but in Dreamfall he comes off as such an incredibly good guy, and I was really pleased to see him doing so well for himself. I also had a befuddled and embarrassed reaction when I met Emma: for some reason, I had played through all of TLJ somehow thinking that Emma and Zoe were the same person! Looking back through my old post, I even mis-identified Emma in my writeup. I'm not sure why I thought that; they don't really look alike, but the graphics are different enough between TLJ and DF:C, and I knew from DF:C that Zoe and April had previously met, so my brain somehow wrangled those two together. This had all confused me earlier in DF when Zoe first hears the name "April Ryan" and doesn't seem to know who that is, leading me to speculate whether Zoe's memory had been erased or something. Anyways! Emma isn't all that crucial to the plot, but I deeply enjoyed the conversation the three of them share, and it was nice to get that character-identity problem out of the way.

It feels like a lot of this game is centered in relationships, which are fluid and evolving. It's great to see how quickly and naturally Zoe can build up a rapport with the people she meets, on both sides of the divide. There isn't a whole lot of opportunity to influence how those relationships develop; this game doesn't yet have anything close to DF:C's reactivity when it comes to expressing your feelings and having others respond. Most of the dialogue is much closer to TLJ, a more traditional flat tree where you just exhaust every prompt and then proceed. But there are a few places where you can make more meaningful choices, and while the effects are very limited, it is nice that the game recognizes those choices and offers some reactivity.

MEGA SPOILERS

The big one I noticed comes near the end, as Kian confronts April on the bridge in the swamp. In my game, I'd had April speak honestly to him during their earlier encounter outside Friar's Keep, and it was neat to hear Kian acknowledge it. I'm sure that events go down more or less the same no matter what tack you take, but just a few lines like that go a long way towards making it feel like your choices have been acknowledged.

As with all of these games, I am left with a lot of questions at the end. A big one is what the deal is with Faith's reported exhortations to "Find April Ryan - save her!" Especially since at the end you're told that you succeeded in doing such, when all the evidence within the game points to the contrary. Narratively and thematically, I think it makes sense that "save her" could mean "redeem her": we aren't meant to protect her body from harm, but to rescue her soul from the bitter and angry path it's on. But... I don't think that happens in the game, she's just as stubborn as ever at the end.

Or, was it all a trap? I do kind of like the idea that the protagonists were manipulated into carrying out their foes' goals while thinking they were doing good, which is something that happens in the other games as well. In trying to find and save April, Zoe brought her out of hiding and into more attention, and indirectly set off the chain of events that led to her being trapped. I don't think we can really ascribe that motivation to Faith, though; she's extremely isolated. Is it possible that Faith was being manipulated, by this "white woman" she references? My immediate thought was that the white woman is the white dragon, which would make sense (the dragon cares for her "sister" and has a great deal of insight); but if it is Helena Chang or someone else, then we might be witnessing multiple layers of manipulation.

Speaking of which: who is Faith? The house she occupies in the lab and in dreamtime reminded me a bit of Saga's house in Chapters, which made me wonder briefly whether they are the same person. I don't think those storylines line up, though.

I remember a lot of Chapters, but it has been over three years since I played it, so my memory is definitely fuzzy; in particular, I'm sure I overlooked some things that would have felt much more significant if I'd had the background of TLJ and Dreamfall while playing it, such as judging Na'ane's betrayal. One particular thing that struck me a lot is near the very end of Dreamfall, when Zoe's subconscious flatly (and ineffectually) warns her father, "That's NOT Reza." That was chilling! I don't remember that being followed up on in Chapters... if I recall, Reza kept watch over Zoe while she was in the coma, and they got back together once she woke up. For years I've been kicking myself for choosing to break up with Reza in Chapters, but now I wonder if I may have extricated Zoe from a tricky situation, and whether I might have missed out on a subplot that would have explained Zoe's warning.

And, casting back to TLJ: The dude at the end of Dreamfall who rescues Brian is Cortez, the guy from the first game who taught April to shift, right? I always thought that he was a "good guy," but given the disruption in the Balance that Brian brings about, maybe he's not.

Speaking of the Balance: the visual design of the Guardian (nee Gordon Holloway) in Dreamfall reminds me a lot of the First Dreamer in Chapters: they're all nude, glowing, and blue with green veining. It is interesting to think about how the Balance is related to the Dreaming. I think that the Balance is contained within the Dreaming, but the Dreaming itself is part of Storytime? I feel like I can piece this together after knowing where Chapters goes. The villains' plot (nearly?) succeeds because the big institutional powers like the Guardian and the White Dragon assume that dreams are natural: dreams are an expected event that links Stark and Arcadia. They overlook this vector, much like the Empire neglected the thermal exhaust port or Khan failed to consider the Y axis. Because they aren't expecting a threat to come from dreams, the forces from Stark are able to infiltrate from there and disrupt the Balance. But, in the end, the dreams of Stark and Arcadia are contingent within the First Dreamer. So, uh, it all works out in the end!

END SPOILERS

As I speculated / threatened years ago, I think this series works quite well when played out of order. There's a circular, cyclic construction to it, and the events in any given game act as both foreshadowing and resolution to the other two. I do want to press ahead and take another crack at Dreamfall Chapters, hopefully sooner rather than later: it's a technically smoother and more attractive game than Dreamfall, while providing great new illumination of and exploration of the wonderful characters and plots that were lovingly developed over the decades. Dreamfall may be my least favorite single entry in the series, but it's still very lovable in its own right, and made even better as part of the whole.

This is the tale of The Longest Journey, and I will tell it in my own words, just as Funcom told it to me

Phew! True to its name, The Longest Journey is one of the longest adventure games I've ever played. One of the best, too! It recaptures what I loved about the adventure games I grew up playing: the excitement of exploration, the heady thrill of a lightbulb going off as you finally see the solution to a puzzle, the warmth of meeting a variety of quirky characters and becoming involved in their lives. It also taps into the elements that I've come to love in more recent years: nuanced relationships, a sense of community, positive representation, and an awareness of social issues.

That's no mean feat given how old this game was: it was released in the final weeks of the last millennium, and was one of the last successful old-school big-budget adventure games. It was created by the Norwegian studio Funcom, outside of the Sierra/LucasArts duopoly that dominated the industry, and I don't think I ever even heard of it despite its critical and commercial acclaim. A few years back I played the last entry in the series, Dreamfall: Chapters. I loved those games, and have been looking forward to playing these prequels for some time now.

Before getting into the game itself, some quick technical notes:

This game is fairly ancient (older than Baldur's Gate II!), and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it ran on my computer. Over more than twenty hours of gameplay, I didn't run into a single crash or freeze or game-breaking bug. That said, it belongs to that awkward early generation of 3D games, which have aged much less gracefully than even older sprite-based games. Textures are blotchy, models are rough. On the plus side, the character animations are surprisingly well-done and hold up great, and the voice acting is so phenomenal that it leads me to forgive almost all flaws.

It runs out of the box on Steam without any mods or patches, but feels like it's barely scraping by. It automatically resizes the monitor resolution to run, and disables Steam Overlay and other elements I've grown used to having. It also janks up the system fonts, so if you notice any problems after exiting the game, re-enable ClearType in the Windows Control Panel. The lack of Steam Overlay means I wasn't able to take any screenshots during the game, so please excuse their absence in this post; I borrowed a few illustrative examples from other sources.

Overall audio quality is good, and the voice acting is fantastic, but there are occasional pops at the start of some audio clips, which is especially distracting when they loop. Fortunately it's very rare, but happens most often in areas near the start of the game.

The one straight-up glitch I noticed was that some characters have textures that are completely missing, so some parts of their bodies are see-through. I don't know for sure what causes this, but I suspect that these were originally pure-black 0x000000 textures that on modern graphics cards are being treated as 0x00000000 instead of 0x000000FF. Fortunately this only affects a few relatively minor characters and wasn't too distracting.

Despite the glitches, though, the art design is insanely good. Every scene has fixed camera angles, with some of the most interesting and artistic layouts I've ever seen. One scene might have an enormous tower that fills the foreground, while you're a spec in the distance, running your way across a deserted parking lot. One is shown through a security camera, with timestamps and frame overlays silently documenting your intrusion. 

Heh... one thing I didn't realize until I was nearly halfway through the game is that you can run somewhere by double-clicking. I happened to discover it during the one puzzle where you're required to move quickly before a timer expires. Up until then, I'd actually really enjoyed the slow, almost languorous pace of the game. It takes time to walk from place to place, but it felt nice, like I was soaking in the ambience of these imaginary worlds instead of racing from one location to another. It actually reminded me quite a bit of Life Is Strange, which similarly deliberately strives for a more laid-back feel for the game. I might have declared my love for The Longest Journey when I realized that you could sit on a bench and just relax there for a while. There's no reason to do this, no in-game motivation, but it feels great to take a break and watch the world go by.

To reiterate, The Longest Journey is an old-school point-and-click adventure game, which is part of the lineage but fundamentally different from the modern choice-and-consequences adventure game. The gameplay is largely oriented around finding clickable areas on the screen, interacting with them, collecting items, combining items, and finding where those items can be used on the screen. It's been quite some time since I've played this style of adventure game, and I feel like TLJ is an especially good example of the form. Most puzzles are well-designed, things you can mentally work through and anticipate a solution, as opposed to desperately trying every possible permutation. One especially good technique the game uses is providing hints when you're close-but-not-quite-there for a solution: instead of just failing to accept something, April will speak a line like "Hm, I need to X this Y before I can use it to Z." That gives a much more graceful progression through puzzles than the impenetrable walls of failure that made the genre infamous.

All that said, there were a handful of times that I gave up and needed to Google a solution. I rarely felt bad about that afterwards. One particular frustration stands out in my mind: there's a fair amount of dialogue in the game, more than in LucasArts games and a lot more than in Sierra games. You'll sometimes have an available prompt like "What do you know about the Dodecahedron of Verisimilitude?", which will lead to a long and engaging explanation. After that you'll see a new prompt like "Remind me about the Dodecahedron", which lets you know that you already explored that line of inquiry and lets you get an abbreviated response that just recaps the most relevant information. Except, in one particular case, asking that "Remind me about..." question causes the other person to share additional information, which is necessary in order to proceed.

As a whole, though, the puzzles generally felt fair and interesting. The dialogue was great, too. I don't think much of it is required to finish the game, but I happily explored every piece of it that I could. The worldbuilding is fantastic, both the big-scale metaphysics of the game and the small-scale relationships April has with her family, friends, and new acquaintances.

Unlike Dreamfall Chapters or other modern adventure games, there really aren't any significant choices or consequences. There might be one or two cases where you can make a decision that has some roleplaying significance for the protagonist, but it never leads to a branching plot line or anything. That would have been cool, but it also doesn't feel like the game needs it... the story is fully compelling on its own terms, even if it does technically run on rails.

MINI SPOILERS

At the top of the list of reasons why I love this game, April Ryan is one of the most likeable protagonists I've played as. An aspiring painter who fled an abusive rural home and is scraping together a new life in the big city, she combines courage and determination with a strong streak of humility, loyalty, and groundedness. She has ambitions and desires, but is also very aware of managing her budget and supporting her friends.

As with Dreamfall Chapters, the game is broken into a series of chapters; a continuous plot runs through the whole thing, but each chapter can be a bit more focused on its particular environment and puzzles. Unlike DC, you keep the same protagonist throughout, and don't necessarily switch between worlds at the end of each chapter: the transitions are tied more to major story beats.

The early chapters were probably the slowest and wonkiest part of the game. I enjoyed them, but I think the game really gets going on your second trip to Stark. Before this time, you're mostly wandering around without much of a goal, trying to find things to do. After this, though, you start taking on a much more heroic role, which feels much more earned and resonant than almost any other game I've played. April stands toe to toe with the truly frightening Gribbler, uses her ingenuity to not only secure her own escape but also provide salvation for an entire community, and it feels really good to witness their happiness afterwards. I can't help contrasting this with, say, the classic King's Quest games, where despite supposedly being in charge of a kingdom it never felt like you were doing these things for anyone's benefit other than yourself and your family.

Again, the game is long, and the plot has ample opportunity for rising and falling action and reversals and revelations and evolutions. After experiencing the heady thrill of moments of triumph, it feels especially disenheartening when April makes a series of (required!) mistakes that bring misfortune on her and those around her. Nearly as bad as the consequences are the actions: April withholds information, lies to her benefactors, tricks her friends, all in order to accomplish something important but they make the failure feel even more abject: April hasn't just failed her mission, she's failed herself. But, it's exactly these sorts of story beats that make April so appealing. She berates herself afterwards, feels guilty, dusts herself off, tries to make amends, and keeps moving forward, a little wiser and a little more determined.

Random thought: I kept thinking of parallels between this game and Life Is Strange. I'm guessing that at least some of them were intentional, given how well-regarded this game is. I noted above that the overall pace and feel of the games are rather similar: you rarely feel pressured to rush to your destination and are encouraged to sit and enjoy the experience. Additionally:

• Both protagonists are 18-year-old art students.
• Both are set in Arcadia.
• Both feature a journal/diary that's regularly updated with the protagonist's thoughts on recent developments.

There are many more thematic and story parallels, but those are more universal, while the above seem more likely to be deliberate homages.

MEGA SPOILERS

Favorite character besides April, Stark edition: Fiona
Most annoying character, Stark edition: Burns Flipper
Favorite character besides April, Arcadia edition: Crow (he grew on me!)
Most annoying character, Arcadia edition: Abnaxus
Favorite map: So many great choices! I might go with the cave under the island.
Favorite chapter: Monsters
Favorite item: Constable Guybrush. (Close second: the flute. I love that you can play this anywhere!)
Favorite music: Maybe the tunes in the cafe?
Best villain: The Gribbler, though Gordon Holloway was also nicely menacing
Favorite lore: There's so much! I honestly glazed over for a lot of it, but the political history of Marcuria was really interesting.
Favorite outfit: Maybe her second Arcadia outfit (which is nicely echoed near the end of Dreamfall: Chapters) or her expensive clothes from upper Venice. I really love how her main Arcadia outfit gradually dirties and degrades over time., and it feels like a relief to finally change out of it.
Favorite animation: Speaking to Crow.
Favorite FMV: I was a little surprised by how back-loaded these were in the game. The first shot of going into orbit was really beautiful. The collapse of Roper Klacks' tower was also great and pretty funny.
Favorite line: "18 feels kinda like 17, only I can buy a gun and pilot a hovercraft."
Saddest event: Thinking that Zoe was killed

END SPOILERS

The Longest Journey was a very long wait - 19 years since its release and two years since I heard about it - but definitely worth it. I'm even more motivated now to press forward and play Dreamfall. It's nice to see that, despite the age and graphical limitations, the game holds up so well. It even holds up well despite me having played the final entry first: I have a pretty strong big-picture idea of what will and won't happen, but there were still many surprises along the way and plenty of moments to enjoy.

For better and worse, they just don't make games like this any more. There will probably never be a major adventure game that requires players to Google for the solutions to puzzles, just adventures where players Google to find out what decisions they should be making. TLJ/Dreamfall seems especially interesting because it's the only franchise I know of that has straddled both sides of that game design chasm, from its old-school origins to its modern conclusion, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Dreamfall helps span that gap.

That song-hole in your face? Push air through it!

Wow! Dreamfall Chapters is awesome. It's a fantastic story, one that I'm still chewing on and lingering over. It's also a terrific game: a fully modernized adventure game, with puzzles that are thoughtful and challenging without ever feeling unfair, and following a TWD-style approach to choice and consequences that helps pull you into the narrative.

The story is a highlight, but also necessarily requires spoilers, so I'll handle that later. First off, some thoughts on the technical aspects of the game, starting with the few things that I disliked.

While the sound in the game is terrific overall, there are some spots where the levels are out of whack. For example, when talking with someone, you might not be able to clearly hear what they're saying because the background sound is too loud. On a related note, the audio can overlap in inconvenient ways. Some audio is triggered by proximity, and other by actions; so you might click on a thing to examine it, and then an NPC will start speaking at the same time, and you won't be able to hear either clearly.

Along the same lines: the game looks gorgeous, and has beautiful AAA-quality scene design and camera work. But, they do occasionally go overboard with camera effects, especially lens artifacts. Sometimes they have persistent smudging or rain drops on the "camera lens", which can be distracting.

Finally, and this is just on me: I didn't realize until the very last scene in the entire game that you can walk by pressing the right mouse button! I really wish I'd figured that out earlier, I think the game would feel much more comfortable as an all-mouse thing. I'd been using WASD, which works fine (and may be necessary for running), but isn't the most natural setup for an adventure game.

And next, some of the MANY things that I appreciated:

Pausable cut scenes! I tried to avoid interrupting them, but on the few occasions that I received a phone call or needed to change the laundry, it was fantastic to be able to instantly pause it midway through and pick right back up when I returned. This should have become univeral in games a long time ago.

The voice acting is terrific. I didn't recognize any of the actors' names, they aren't in the normal posse of voice actors who I idolize, but were really talented and universally professional. (To put it in more specific terms: they were, as a whole, better than the VO in Wasteland 2 or Pillars of Eternity, and on par with the Dragon Age franchise). This is, of course, critically important in a story-focused game like this, and I'm glad that they invested so much care in it. It's particularly helpful in pulling off cases where they are presenting characters who seem like bad guys but are actually good guys, or vice versa. Having the "right" tone for something like that really helps pull it off without actively misleading players.

I LOVED the triple-presentation of dialogue. Most old-school RPGs, like Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity, have a voiceless protagonist and will present you with entire lines of dialogue which you can choose between. More modern games with voiced protagonists, like the Telltale Games adventures and BioWare's dialogue wheel games, will typically have brief summaries to select from; after choosing one, you'll hear a longer voiced line that expands on the summary. In Dreamfall, your choice is typically a single word: "Wit", "Angry", "Politics", for example. Hovering over the choice, though, will trigger an inner monologue as your active protagonist mulls over the topic. "Wit is a brilliant engineer. If anyone can solve this problem, it will be him. I'm not sure if I can get through to him, though." Selecting it will speak, but it might be much briefer than the monologue: "What about Wit?" It's brilliant, because it gives you the full context for the dialogue and for the choice that you're making, without requiring your character to be verbose.

I alluded to this a bit before, but the puzzle design is fantastic. For starters, you're typically facing one puzzle at a time (though occasionally you'll have multiple objectives that you can pursue independently). Everything is collocated nicely: if everything you need is in the courtyard, they'll block out the exits, or have your character automatically turn around when you try to leave. It's impossible to ever get stuck, and there's none of that nonsense of "You need to remember to pick up Item A in Scene 1 in order to solve the puzzle in Scene 4." It isn't really possible to lose, either. If something bad does happen, like getting spotted by a guard, then the screen will flash, and you'll quietly return to a few seconds earlier, where you can try again.

Okay, it's almost storytime! (Humor!) I did throw together a couple of albums, which are heavily but not completely captioned. Most of my reaction to the plot proper is included in those, with my ramblings on larger themes and theories below. I captioned these after beating the game, so if you haven't yet played Book Five, you may want to refrain.

Book One (also linked from the end of my previous post)
Book Two
Book Three
Book Four
Book Five

Okay, here are some

MINI SPOILERS (mostly Books Two through Four, not much plot stuff)

Let's start with an easy one: boy, lots of characters have similar names. It took me a little while to properly track Anna, Enu, and Hannah. I don't think the similar names are significant, but they still threw me.

There seem to be a few doppelgangers between worlds. Abby, Hanna's girlfriend, reminded me a lot of one of the non-human Resistance members in Arcadia. I don't think there's any importance to that - based on the lore we get near the end of the game, it seems like Zoe is the only person who can actually cross worlds in that way - but it was an interesting, subtle way to tie them together.

I thought they did a really good job of giving an in-universe explanation for why the player might not recognize certain characters from previous games. That came up for me a couple of times, since I haven't played The Longest Journey or the original Dreamfall, so when some prominent cameos appeared later I could tell that Zoe knew them while I did not. (I'm thinking in particular of meeting  Brian inside Abnaxus's library.) Fortunately, Zoe's coma and memory loss is a major element of the game, and so I could pick "I'm sorry, who are you?" without feeling at all guilty. It reminded me a little of Baldur's Gate 2, another game that extends an earlier story but wanted to allow players to jump immediately in to the sequel, likewise, in that game, you have undergone extreme mental anguish and so the characters around you will sympathetically respond to your lack of comprehension.

All right, let's talk about decision-making! Choice-and-consequences! I think that Dreamfall Chapters might have the best C&C that I've seen in a game. Granted, I just finished the game and am still riding high on it, so take that with a grain of salt. But I think they've managed to outshine even the seminal Walking Dead adventure games in their presentation of branching narrative and contingency.

Let's start with one specific example from fairly early in the game. Kian tracks down an Azadi officer and questions him about the occupation's plans. You have a choice: you can torture him, or just verbally threaten him. Being a decent human being, I chose the latter.

I was delighted to see that, in breaking with the poisonous Hollywood tradition of the past fifteen years, Dreamfall does not reinforce the idea that torture is the best way to gain intelligence. You have plenty of leverage with this person, and learn the information you need: yes, the Azadi are planning to rain Marcuria and drive out the magicals.

However! While the decision to torture or not does not affect the information you uncover, it does affect how others perceive that information. In particular, Likho does not believe it because it was not acquired with violence. And so he refuses to act on the intelligence, and as a result, the rebels are driven from the city (though not before inflicting heavy casualties on the invaders).

That's a case where a choice played out in an unexpected way, although in a way that's still linked to the origin. Other choices have far-reaching consequences that could not possibly be anticipated ahead of time. Who could have predicted that ordering organic sausages would result in a business being destroyed and a relationship breaking up? This sometimes felt frustrating to me.

I'm used to more clearly marked paths, like "Do you want to save Ashley or Kaidan?", or "Do you want to romance Sera or Josephine?" In a lot of games I play, there are choices, but the choices are primarily between outcomes. Surprises can still result - you'll be facing down a Specter's gun in Mass Effect 3, or fighting a duel for Josephine's honor - but you know in advance which path you're heading down. In Dreamfall, though, you aren't picking the outcome, you're picking the choice. That feels much more realistic. The world is filled with unintended consequences: the random minor decisions we make throughout the day might result in meeting a spouse or starting a new business, while our much-contemplated five-year-plans never unfold exactly as planned.

Besides being more realistic, I think it's also more narratively powerful. I felt a deep sense of guilt when a character died due to a series of choices I had made. Crucially, none of those choices was "kill this character" - at each step along the way, I thought I was doing the right thing, and was keeping a strong relationship with that character. And so the death came as a total, gut-punching shock. But, I also knew that the death was totally a result of the choices I had made, so I still felt responsibility. That combination of guilt and shock is powerful! (As a contrast, think of how much more powerful the ending of Dragon Age 2 would have been if that disaster had only happened if you fulfilled Justice's mission. Most players probably do this anyways, so it narratively fits, but knowing that it is inevitable undercuts the player's personal sense of ownership in the outcome.)

I'm definitely going to replay the game later, and am very curious to see how things change. Some of the alternate outcomes seem straightforward - for example, I'm pretty sure how certain things will change if you don't bring Likho along on your mission - but the game also seems to have a lot of contingent choices, so there may be entire sub-plots and sub-choices that I haven't even seen. For example, I had a choice that unlocked an "intimate moment" with Likho on board the airship, but I couldn't have even made that choice if I hadn't previously decided to bring him along. That makes me wonder what other branches lie in store. It's different from, for example, the choice structure I used in Caldecott, where events at point B will play out differently depending on what you did back at point A; instead, you may be facing entirely different points C or D. It's a much more expensive way to build games, since you're spending a lot of time and resources on content that many players will never encounter, but it does pay off in making players believe that their choices matter.

Choice is a huge part of the game, but just as interesting as the things you can change (inadvertently or not) are the things you can't change. One big example of this is Kian's sexual orientation. I took the option to have him kiss Anna in Book Two because, hey, she's a mysterious red-headed stranger and he's a cool dude, why wouldn't they smooch? Then I went "Whoops!" in Book Three once I realized that Kian was gay. You can choose to kiss or not to kiss, but kissing a girl doesn't make him magically straight. As with picking-choices-instead-of-outcomes, this was sometimes frustrating, but ultimately feels much more realistic and significant. We can affect things in our lives, but there are far more things that we cannot change.

I do kind of wonder about Anna. Saga says something like "I don't know who you are, so you must not be important." That makes me curious if she can die and not be present in the end-game. Again, contingencies! I'm glad she stuck around, though... her story is filled with irony, but it's still compelling.

MEGA SPOILERS (mostly Book Five stuff)

The plot gets really complex in Book Five. They introduce a bunch of new characters, including the Prophet and Zoe's parents. Almost everything gets explained, but it felt a little like information overload. There are lots of interlocking factions: there's no one single person or group who's behind everything; instead, everyone is manipulating everyone else, trying to use one another to pursue their own goals. In the end, more of the bad guys are taken out by each other than by the good guys.

I kind of rolled my eyes at Helena Chang's explanation of how Zoe was able to physically manifest in Europolis while dreaming in the lab, thanks to "entangled particles". It's pseudo-scientific babble that reminds me of people using "Dark Matter" and "Chaos Theory" back in the 1990s when they didn't want to just say "magic".

While the quantum mechanics bit seemed silly, though, I loved everything else about the big-picture plot revelation. I really like the idea that dreaming precedes reality. Saga explains (with some exasperation) that what she's doing isn't magic or sorcery. Everything, including magic, exists within the dream. You can reshape the world by shaping the dream. That's what the primary villains were after: Helena wanted to craft a new world by altering the dream; Brian wanted to return home by disrupting the dream; The Six wanted to eliminate magic from the world by removing it from the dream.

The big lore-bombs came in Book Five, but I feel like the big meta-revelation came in Book Four, where you meet Lux, "The First Dreamer". I'm not 100% sure of the following, but I want it to be true: the entire universe exists inside Lux's mind. Everyone we meet in the game is living in a contingent reality. People only have existence for as long as the dream lasts. If Lux ever were to wake up and stop dreaming, everything (in the game's universe) would cease to exist. Nothing has an independent reality outside of Lux's mind.

I'm reminded of Berkeley's philosophy, where he argues (surprisingly persuasively) that there's no such thing as matter. We can have no direct experience of matter: we only know what our senses tell us, mediated through our minds. A thing cannot exist without something perceiving it. In Berkeley's Christian view, the whole of the universe is sustained because God is constantly thinking it. In Dreamfall's view, the universe is sustained because Lux is dreaming it.

This is probably reaching even more, but I'm tempted to draw parallels to gaming as well. In Books One and Two, there's a strong tie between the dream machines and video games: they're isolating devices into which people strap themselves, having vivid virtual experiences disconnected from the real world. Book Four, though, got me thinking: Zoe's adventure in Arcadia is a video game. Specifically, it's "Dreamfall Chapters", the video game that I am playing right now. Zoe, as a character, only exists because I am playing this game and thinking of her. She doesn't have an independent reality outside of the game. Within the context of the game, though, she is a fully-realized, three-dimensional character with her own hopes and fears and actions.

Throughout Book Five, Saga keeps saying "That's how the story is written." Within the context of the game, this means something like, "Fate dictates that events must happen this way." But what Saga is saying is quite literally true. Things are happening this way because Red Thread Games, the developers of Dreamfall, wrote the script that way. They have a climax that requires Saga to bridge Arcadia and Stark, and so she does it, because that's how they made the game. As an adventure game, there are some things that are set in stone (characters, factions, settings, certain required plot beats) and some things that are variable (choices, locations, people living or dying). That seems to line up with how Saga sees the world: there are fixed points that must always happen, and also "unimportant" things that can vary. I love the idea that Saga is aware of this. Much like Vivec in Morrowind, she may be a video game character who has realized that she is in a game, and can use that knowledge to her advantage.

And, to close the circle, it's a fun mental experiment to wonder if we are characters in someone else's video game, characters in someone else's dream. Would we know?  Does it make a difference?

To an extent, this can seem disappointing, especially within the context of the game itself. After all, "It was all just a dream" is the most hacky, cliched ending ever. But, get rid of that "just". And change that "was" to an "is". You suddenly have a much more compelling idea.

Again - all the above is just my own musing, I'm pretty sure it isn't intended by the game. But that says a lot for the quality of the storytelling, that it can create a world that's so vivid and enticing and open-ended that it can bring your thoughts to interesting places.

Speaking of Saga:

Near the end of Book Four, there was some talk of something being "divided into two". Given the context at the time, I thought they were referring to April Ryan, and was curious about what that division was. My first thought was that part of her might live on in Saga, who, after all, we meet after April has died. By the end of Book Five, though, I came to believe that it was referring to the Dreaming and the Undreaming. At first, they were together; then they separated, and the Undreaming caused problems; now they are reunited, and the balance is restored.

That said, I do still like the idea that Saga is a reincarnation of April. That could be very cool and time-twisty: near the very end of the game, we see a very pregnant Zoe; at the moment you see her, a Steam achievement pops up called "Baby Papa" with the descriptive text "We'll never tell." At first, I thought this was just being cheeky about whether Reza was the father or not; however, someone online made the observation that the only character in the whole game who goes by "Papa" is Saga's father. Therefore, it's possible that Saga is Zoe's granddaughter. When April walks away at the end of Storytime, she says "We have a long journey ahead of us." Besides being an awesome self-referential line, it also helps set up the timeline nicely: what if the time it takes her to leave Storytime is also the time until Saga is born?

We know that time in the House Between Worlds is inconsistent; time spent inside its walls can be much longer or shorter than time outside. It does still seem to be linear; there doesn't seem to be any risk of returning to a time before you left. But, given the very end of the game, it seems like it must be circular as well: regardless of whether Saga is April, Saga does meet April at the end, even though we know that the younger Saga helped Zoe after April died. I absolutely adore that looping, Finnegans Wake-esque structure, where the end of the story is its beginning. Yes, it's a paradox for April to meet herself, but it's a lovely paradox.

END SPOILERS

I've known for a while that I want to go back and play The Longest Journey and Dreamfall, partly because this game is so darn good and also because Naomi recommended it. I feel even more motivated now.  The developers have set up a really clever narrative situation where it can retroactively make sense to play the games in this order, so I won't necessarily feel like I'm backtracking and covering the stuff I'd missed before, but actually extending the end of this wonderful story I've just finished.

Of course, if I do that, I'm certain that I'll also play through Dreamfall Chapters again. There are some very specific things that I want to do differently next time around, and I'm also curious to see how many other things can change based on my actions.

I'm looking forward to that. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of replaying adventure games (modern, branching-plotline adventure games rather than retro confounding-puzzles adventure games) as opposed to replaying RPGs. The first time you play a good adventure game, a well-designed puzzle might take you twenty minutes or so to solve. You'll walk around, examine the environment, try a bunch of different things, ponder, observe, get inspired, and find the solution. On a replay, of course, you can go straight for the solution, possibly cutting down the time to five minutes or less. So, on a replay, you're focusing more of your time on the stuff you actually care about: learning more about characters, exploring different plot lines, maybe replaying some scenes you particularly liked.

I do enjoy replaying RPGs - I go back every couple of years to Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age - but so much of the time in those games is devoted to fighting and fiddling around with resources. That can be fun as well, especially if you're trying out a new build or taking a new party, but subsequent replays are likely to be just as long of time commitments as the first game, which is a substantial requirement for a role-playing game. As much as I'm curious to see what an evil playthrough of Baldur's Gate looks like, or a Warden ruling Ferelden, I don't often have the luxury of enough time to see it through.

As I grow older, I find myself more and more drawn to games that focus on stories, told in compelling and thought-provoking ways. Dreamfall Chapters is now near the top of that list.