The Longest Journey

Just finished Ragnar Tornquist's "The Longest Journey" on Steam- that truly was a fantastic game. I can only imagine what it must have been like when it came out. Games are uniquely a product of their time, a sort of pop culture item that almost always plays best when they're first released. Coming back to a game can often be rewarding, and how much of a game's greatness remains throughout the passage of time is an important metric. To me anyway.

Anyway- The Longest Journey is a great point and click style adventure game, set in twin worlds of near-future Stark and magic-soaked Arcadia. Gameplay is purely a graphical -use- -item- type affair, with some very clever puzzles. The writing is excellent, the voice acting good in most places, and the entire tone had me chuckling to myself fairly often.

I will admit straight out that I often used a FAQ, as well as tapping ESC to skip unimportant animations constantly. When it comes to games from the past, games that are on my 'completion list', I have no qualms with rushing through them at the expense of some of the immersion and experience. By not playing them when at their peak, when they first came out, I'm already losing out a little bit anyway. Given the amount of historical games that I want to get to, I feel some sacrifices must be made to hit that goal.

I'm now moving on to the sequel, "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey". A clunky fight mechanic has been shoe-horned it. Strike one. Also, with the move to 3d third person gameplay, the controls with mouse and keyboard are somewhat clumsy. Still, I'm optimistic, because I have already ran into a number of characters from the first game, and the story immediately picked up the threads from that game as well. Here's to hoping that the lead, Zoe, is as clever and interesting as April from #1.

I'll revisit this topic later, because the series certainly deserves more attention than this, even so long after it's release.