Memories of The Longest Journey

A couple of days ago a kickstarter campaign was announced by Red Thread Games for a game called Dreamfall Chapters. If it is successful it will be the third in a series that started with a little adventure called "The Longest Journey" back in 1999. That game turned out to be not only one of the best of all time but also one of the greatest emotional experiences one could have with a video game.

I first heard of it back in early 1999 when a local PC game magazine had an article about the most anticipated games of the year. Now a bit of temporal context may be needed here. During the early and mid 90s, adventure games were a hugely popular genre. Some called them "The king of video games" much like shooters used to be until recently. However with the evolution of graphics and technology overall, adventure games that were mostly based on logical puzzles, great stories and humour gradually moved to the sidelines to make room for more action packed games. For many years they were considered a dead genre with only a few dedicated developers releasing little gems now and then. I'm happy to say that these last couple of years there has been a re-emergence of the genre, kickstarter helping bring back favorite franchises and new exciting ones and companies like Telltale games finally making it big, their dedication to the genre finally being rewarded.

Anyway, I digress. So it was the late 90s and adventure games were not at their pick but were still quite popular among certain crowds. It's no wonder then that such a game held a high spot in the most anticipated of the year list. Although young I really liked adventure games. However I was more excited about strategy games and RPGs at the time so I didn't think much of it initially. I was about to have my mind blown.

I played it for the first time back in 2000 and have never played it since. I tried to a couple of times but my old CDs didn't want to cooperate with the newer operating systems. Luckily it is available on GoG.com and other outlets. Those who want to play it shouldn't have a hard time doing so. Sadly I don't have the time to go through a second playthrough of it and it's sequel, Dreamfall, for this post so what follows is what is says on the title. Memories. Memories and the lasting impressions the game left for me. Feel free to regard my musings as tainted by the rose coloured glasses of nostalgia but I thought it worth it to write them nonetheless.

I should start with some background info about the story and characters but I'd rather begin with my first impression of the game. You controll a young woman, in her underwear and for some strange reason she wears her shoes. It's nothing erotic, just the clothes she was sleeping in. She stands at the edge of the cliff and looking ahead there is an alien fantasy land. Behind her on the cliff there is a nest with a huge white egg in it. An earthquake occures and the egg trickles down the cliff and almost falls over, only saved by a couple of branches. That's where you begin. You have to save the egg and end this dream. But when you do you get a visit from the mother, a white dragon and she speaks to you. Suddenly a dark shadowy form appears and you wake up sweating in your bed. I'm sure my words don't do it justice but I was hooked at just that. It was such an imaginative start with a fairy tale feeling that persists for the rest of the game.

The game itself takes place in not one but two worlds, the joined worlds of technology, called Stark, and magic, called Arcadia. April Ryan, the protagonist, is a young art student living in Stark with no knowledge of the other side. However she has the ability to cross over and a destiny to save the two worlds from the forces of chaos.

Now I said two worlds but it feels like three. If I remember interviews of the time correctly, this was intentional. The world of Stark as you originally see it feels much like our own world. It is a familiar place to us as it is for April. So when you cross over to Arcadia for the first time, the fantasy and wonder is similar for both the player and the character. And what a place Arcadia is! We have all seen plenty of fantasy settings, I'm sure, in games, books, movies and TV-series. However most have their own order and rules they follow and eventually you get to know them and they become mundane or at least lose some of their glitter. The world of Arcadia is like that of a fairy-tale in a child's mind.

There is a geography and what you'd expect of a city like a market, taverns, a port etc. However there are also all sorts of rare and magic findings like talking trees, a fellow that experiences time backwards, a race of guides that share thoughts and memories, flying and waterborn races. It's not that we haven't seen these things before. It's that feeling that anything can happen. A lot of adventure games have that freedom since for an adventure game you don't need a world (like for an RPG), you need a story. The Longest Journey manages to create both a world and a story like the best of them.

The third "world" you visit is Stark again but this time you delve into cyberpunk territories. Stark is sience fiction and it has a very distinct dark side and you have to navigate fututistic police stations, evil coorporations and meet with hackers.

What makes the game so great are a couple of elements combined together. First and foremost is story. It is one of the most complex and mature writen in the medium. It is sci-fi and fantasy and real life, it's got twists and turns and a great finalle. It is also amazingly written. The main writter, Ragnar Torniquist and his team did a stellar job. There is also a lot of it. People have complained about dialogues taking up to half an hour but it was so enjoyable I wouldn't trade a minute of it.

Then there are the characters. Cortez, a mysterious stranger that helps April in her journey and who is more than he seems, Crow, April's talking companion bird and comedy sidekick, April's friends, the Guardian and so many others. The greatest of them all being April Ryan. Now from time to time I've seen lists about the greatest female leads in computer games and I literally cringe whenever she isn't mentioned. She is smart, couragious, driven, imaginative. She also has her problems, her insecurities and fears. Till this day she is my favorite female character in video games. The Longest Journey, the title, refers to her journey between two worlds and beyond but also refers to the longest journey of her life, the one from puberty to adulthood.

Then there was gameplay. Classic point and click adventure fare. The puzzles were excelent, from interesting to the really inventive like beating a great evil wizard at math using a calculator. It wasn't very difficult but that is a plus for me. I'm sure there are hardcore adventure fans out there who like their games tough as nails. I sympathize, I usually like some challenge myself but when it comes to adventures specifically I hate for a puzzle to block me for days. I lose momentum and the pacing of the story. The Longest Journey is huge for an adventure games so all the more reason to keep the story going forward. Luckily there was no puzzle that took me hours to figure out. Well actually there was one. I wouldn't mention it but I've seen other people on the internet complain about it. The one with the rubber duck. Those who've played the game probably know what I'm talking about. I actually had to look at a walkthrough for that one.

After all this I'm afraid that I still can't communicate sufficiently just how good this game is. Just go play it and see for yourselves. I would have the concern that I raised the bar too high with praise and the experience might dissapoint in the end but for this particular one I don't think there's reason to worry.

The Longest Journey finally had a sequel in 2006, called Dreamfall. I was so excited back then, I had a Dreamfall wallpaper on my PC for months. This time the main protagonist was a girl named Zoe from Stark but you would also controll two more characters, Kian Alvane, a warrior from Arcadia and an adult and dissilusioned April who was now a rebel, stuck in Arcadia.

Dreamfall has some glaring faults. First of all it fails totaly as an adventure game. It's more like interactive storytelling. I remember there was just one puzzle. Everything else was just too obvious to qualify as such. Then there were stealth and fighting sequences that were so badly done, the game would benefit greatly from not having them at all. It was a time of consoles when adventure games weren't being made any more so I guess they tried to tap into a new audience. That experiment, I must say, didn't go that well. As a consequence gone was the point and click gameplay as well, replaced by arrow key movement and pressing a key to interact.

If all that wasn't bad enough, the story, the main selling point of the game, was dull and uninteresting. Until about chapter 4, that is. After that it was pure bliss. It was all the things that the story of the original was, imaginative, intelligent, funny. In fact it was so good that it carried the wreck that was the rest of the game, resulting in an overall very enjoyable experience. At first I was really dissapointed with this sequel but it eventually won me over. Except for Kian Alvane, I never liked him.

I have to make a small detour here to mention something that occurs in just one scene of the game but it was so exciting and inovative that I just have to write something about it. I'm a fan of good dialogue in games. Both RPGs and adventure games have the potential for some very interesting dialogue scenes and there are many games that have inovated and iterated and have some brilliant dialogue. However I can only think of two instances when my mind was blown not by the topics discussed but by the format. One was in the hall of Sensates in Planescape: Torment. The other in Dreamfall. In Dreamfall at some point two of your characters meet and they have a conversation. I already had controll of one of them and as the dialogue started I was given some choices. I made mine and waited, fully expecting the other character to act as an NPC and answer back. However to my great surprise the camera shifted from behind one character to behind the other and now I got to chose the responce myself. It went on like this till the end of the dialogue. Now it may sound like talking with yourself but it was more like instead of one responce to your choice there were several and it was up to you to decide which one would be uttered.

Now back to topic, there was yet another problem with the story in Dreamfall. It ended in a cliffhanger. It wasn't cut in half or anything. No, a chapter definitely ended, one tale was told. The problem was that the story was more than one chapter long and we were left craving for more, with no continuation in sight. Ragnar Torniquist went on to lead the development of the MMO The Secret World and there was very little talk about the Dreamfall sequel it so desperately needed.

That is until now, or rather a few months ago. Torniqust announced that he was leaving Funcom, the company the made the first two games, to start his own company, their first game being the sequel to Dreamfall. Thankfully we didn't have to wait long for any more news, it has been more than 6 years since Dreamfall, we've waited plenty. As I said in the intro, a kickstarter campain for Dreamfall Chapters is well underway and the way it's going it seems like 2014 will be the year we finally get the third game in the series.

From what they've announced so far it will conclude the story of Zoe. She will be the main protagonist but she will be joined by two other playbale characters. One of the two I guess is probably April but no announcement has been made so far regarding them. I'm also happy to report that it will be a more traditional adventure game than Dreamfall. The team have said that they intent to make it the best of the three, borrowing the best elements of the first two games. As they say in these circumstances, only time will tell. However, given their track record, I'm confident that at least the story will be deep and engaging and imaginative and magical.

This concludes my retrospective of the Longest Journey series. As I mentioned all I've wrote about the two games is from what I remember and it has been more than 12 years since I played the first and 6 years for the second, so if I've gotten some things wrong or didn't mention really memorable moments, I apologize. Feel free to let me know in the comments.

The future of adventure games is looking better and better and this in particular is a series that I'm happy to see survive and thrive due to the love of so many people.