Product Reviews

Dreamfall is the belated sequel to The Longest Journey, considered by some to be among the best adventure games ever created. The Longest Journey used a mix of 2D and 3D graphics, and the developers of Dreamfall faced the unenviable challenge of transferring this to a completely 3D world without straying too far from the elements that made the original successful.

To some extent, they succeeded. The Longest Journey was notable for being a game designed for adults, with a torturously long plot, puzzles hard enough to leave your mind hurting for days, and a lot of swearing. Dreamfall's plot follows on directly from the original story, and is no less complicated. This plot plays out in two worlds, and both have been spectacularly created in 3D. The environments are large but detailed, and a few are genuinely awe-inspiring at first glance. You control your characters in the third person using a bizarre keyboard and mouse control system. This never becomes easy to use, but over the course of the game we found it progressed from abominably hard to merely frustrating.

Unfortunately,

Far worse are the difficulties with gameplay. The Longest Journey was a traditional point-and-click adventure, in which you advanced by talking to characters and collecting items that could then be used to solve puzzles. Some criticised it for containing puzzles that were extremely difficult, and the designers of Dreamfall seem to have overcompensated for this. The puzzles in Dreamfall are very simple, and most of them require little or no thought to solve. Like the best recent adventure games such as Beyond Good and Evil, Dreamfall also contains fighting and stealth sequences, but they're equally simplistic and easy to complete. Only one part of the game had us guessing what to do next, and even then not for very long.

Playing Dreamfall is an unusual experience. It's enjoyable and interesting, but not particularly interactive; it's more like watching a film than playing a game. Interaction with characters and their decision-making can create real emotional involvement in the best games, but Dreamfall falls short of this. You'll probably enjoy it and some might even love it, but we defy anyone to be amazed by it.