Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was released in 2006, a good seven years after the original game and into a very different gaming landscape. Classic click 'n' point adventures games had sung their formal swansong years earlier and now only existed in the dreams of random central-European bedroom developers, and the world was still several years away from both the genre's transformation into more narrative and choice-focused stories and the Kickstarter revival of the genre's old conventions. The gaming market in general had shifted its focus to consoles and attracting mass markets and so developing a PC-only adventure game was basically a guaranteed commercial suicide at this point. In all honesty and sympathy Funcom didn't have an easy task ahead of them after they finally felt ready to revisit the story. They had to reinvent the basic gameplay loop to make it more marketable, adapt it into an entirely different 3D-based and gamepad-oriented standard, and narratively pull something out of the bag that would not just act as a satisfactory continuation for the old fans who were desperate to return to Stark and Arcadia, but which would also attract any newcomers who had in all likelihood never even heard of The Longest Journey.
In what is an incredible hat trick move for the ages, Dreamfall stumbles with each and every aspect of the above, and replaying it has only made it more obvious.
The most glaring problem Dreamfall has is that it simply isn't exciting or fun to play. Rather than solving puzzles by clicking around in a 2D scenery, you now control your character (one of three protagonists - I'll get to that) directly through a 3rd person perspective in a 3D environment, and at first everything seems OK and familiar even if it looks different: you've still got an inventory, the primary character Zoë has a journal like April did and games like Gabriel Knight 3 and Grim Fandango had proven that the genre could not only translate to a 3D environment well but take advantage of the new dimension as well, the former in its freewheeling camera that made detective work more detective-y and the latter embracing its blocky 1998 3D aesthetics to create one of the most memorable worlds in the genre. Dreamfall doesn't do anything like that and it doesn't even attempt to: despite the new possibilities, Funcom strip down gameplay elements and this makes the game so linear that it's actually frustrating to play. The puzzles are perfunctory and roughly 95% of them boil down to the player interacting with an environmental object in one room, going to an adjacent room to pick up an item, and then using that item on the object. They take about 30 seconds to complete and feel like needless busywork to give the illusion that Dreamfall is an old-school puzzler; sometimes you even get to combine items (woo!), but even the separate parts can typically be found literally next to one another and so your job is to simply spend a few seconds in the menu before you can advance. The puzzles are so simple that halfway through I actually wished they weren't there to begin with, because all they do is slow down the narrative for no real reason - tasks to tick on a chore list before you get to play the game, highlighting the difference between easy puzzles and needless admin. Outside the """puzzles""" the gameplay consists of running around from one screen to the next, finding the next piece of spelled-out busywork to process or the next dialogue tree to navigate. The tedium is sometimes broken by minigames, one for lockpicking (actually decent) and hacking (as tedious as its narrative justification is contrived), everyone's favourite trend stealth sections (awkward and frustrating) and - in what is the most baffling decision - actual combat sequences. The infrequent brawling in the game feels like a precisely engineered dictionary example of a forced action mechanic that has been included purely for marketing purposes, forced by a publisher because of a hypothetical market increase. It is quite possibly the worst tacked-on combat element I've ever seen in a game but on the bright side it's also so easy thanks to its mindnumbing simplicity and bad AI that the only thing slowing the player down is waiting for the next wave to start.
You can also tell that Funcom were struggling with the development of the game in general. The mid-2000s were a particularly awkward time for PC gaming because of the demands set by the the massively expanded console market, and the hardware and control limitations of the Playstation and XBox compared to the PC could really mess with gaming studios who had formerly only ever developed with the PC audience in mind. At the time this was called consolitis and though the term reeks of PC gaming master race subreddits, behind the unfortunate name lies a genuine phenomenon describing botched attempts of concept and design streamlining when dealing with perhaps unexpected technical restrictions. Dreamfall may as well be the shining example of the consolitis era (together with Deus Ex: Invisible War) given how full it is of the traditional hallmarks of the syndrome. The already cramped gameplay areas are segmented to countless small zones where you spend as much time staring at loading screens as you do on travelsal, there's minimal interactivity within the environment itself that leads to an eery feeling of ghost towns and meaningless NPCs, and the menus are all super-sized yet at the same time lacking in actual information. The grand fantasy metropolis of Marcuria feels smaller in this game than it did in TLJ despite the possibilities the extra dimension could allow because it's been split into claustrophobic corridors full of artificial blocks, all its small sectors coming across hollow and devoid of life. The aforementioned journal that Zoë keeps is more of a microblog with a strict character limit and the emotional resonance of a "Hello Twitter, today I ate eggs for breakfast" style microblog, which is simply compared to April's lengthy journal rambles about her experiences in TLJ.
In summary, if The Longest Journey was an epic adventure that felt larger than life and conjured the most incredible vistas and scenes, Dreamfall behaves like you are walking the same three corridors each day and occasionally hearing someone in another room talk about the rest of the building, which you can't access because the stairways are blocked with ankle-high boxes, all the doors are locked and you're chained to the handrail.
This could be saved by the plot - after all, there are many great hyperlinear narrative adventures where you don't even detect the restrictions because the story is so captivating. To Funcom's credit, Dreamfall starts out very well and despite the gameplay interruptions, the game's initial narrative is a decent hook. Rather than directly continuing April Ryan's story, Dreamfall takes place some years after and introduces the recently ex-boyfriended university dropout Zoë Castillo who struggles to find meaning and focus in her life (and my gods is she going through textbook depression but the game very nicely doesn't awkwardly hammer this in so the player definitely gets it). Zoë's story arc starts small but despite some contrivances (her hacker friend is way too convenient and one-dimensional to ever feel like anything more than a gameplay proxy), her stumbling onto something far bigger than she can at first even comprehend soon begins to weave old familiar themes (and worlds and people) and new ideas together in a manner that compells, even on a replay (though I had forgotten some of the detail, once more). That is, at least, if you're a TLJ veteran, which is the perspective I'm coming from: the writing doesn't do a particularly good job of treating newcomers as well as it does veterans, and particular aspects (primarily most things Arcadia and some of the major characters and themes of April's original story) are never explained thoroughly enough so that someone new to the series could have a full grasp of what's happening and why.
You meet and get to play as April too, now almost a new character after a decade of feeling lost both physically and mentally following the events of TLJ but somewhere inside that gruff demeanour is something recognisable.
Then things start falling apart little by little. The further you dwell in the (mostly) Stark-side plot with Zoë the more it becomes a sequence of conspiracy clichés and seemingly random curveballs that are barely explained: there's ghost girls, corporate espionage action sequences, global conspiracies, secret pasts, corrupt megacorps etc. Eventually you lose track of what you're meant to actually pay attention on, and Zoë's character (and acting) seems to get less engaged the more you play and the more Zoë is meant to be focused on finding the answers to all the questions around her. While Zoë gets to visit Arcadia a couple of times, most of the time spent in the world of magic is split between the other two characters. April returns and after a decade wandering without meaning both mentally and physically following the events of TLJ, her initial gruff but still recognisably April demeanour transforms into a one-note, out-of-character nihilistic angst that torpedoes any dialogue she engages in. The third character, the religious zealot Kian who represents the foreign military might who has occupied Marcuria and which acts as the game's main antagonist faction, begins to appear more prominently from halfway point onwards and represents the lowest of the game's lows. He has the personality, presence and acting of a balsa wood chair, his story sequences feature the most action sequences out of all the characters and even though you can predict every single story beat of his arc the journey through it is still executed so haphazardly that it feels completely illogical and pulled out of thin air. Sometimes the wider issues of the game even end up affecting the narrative, as the different characters find themselves in the same recycled environments in Arcadia over and over again in what feels like contrivance dictated by asset reusage over any real narrative reason.
Much like TLJ Dreamfall does build to an emotional gut punch ending, which I vividly remembered completely throwing me off emotionally when I was younger and which haunted my mind for several days after the game finished. Without saying much more, it is still in some ways a very moving ending - but I didn't find it so powerful this time around because all I kept thinking is how badly the narrative ends if this is the only entry you'll ever play. Dreamfall is the middle part of a trilogy and like all the worst middle parts, it fires off oh so many cliffhangers and raises oh so many questions in the final stretches towards its credits roll, all of which are left unanswered and which leaves a bad taste in the mouth even as the game cranks up the emotional heft of the narrative in its last chapters. The power of the poignant ending is left dulled and dampened when you realise just how many central elements of the entire game so far had been left completely blank, when for half the game you don't know why you're doing something or what it is you're even doing to begin.
This is probably the third time I've played Dreamfall and each time I come away from it with more hesitations. Once the novelty - the return to the familiar things from the first game (particularly powerful if you had been aware of the original since 1999), experiencing the new plot for the first time, etc - has worn off, you start paying attention to everything else and you begin to see the holes. The plot and the characters are inconsistent and the gameplay is subpar, and once those start jumping on your face it's hard to pay attention to the good parts. Dreamfall straddles the fine line between bad and boring - it's an honestly middling gameplay experience and ultimately unsuccessful in most of its goals. It's a game that's going through a major identity crisis in so many ways, by developers who seemed to be second guessing what they wanted to achieve with this entry while also planning threads towards the next one, before they could even confirm there was ever going to be a third part. In my books, Dreamfall is one of the worst stumbles in quality within a series, the likes of which are rare to find to this extent.
In what is an incredible hat trick move for the ages, Dreamfall stumbles with each and every aspect of the above, and replaying it has only made it more obvious.
The most glaring problem Dreamfall has is that it simply isn't exciting or fun to play. Rather than solving puzzles by clicking around in a 2D scenery, you now control your character (one of three protagonists - I'll get to that) directly through a 3rd person perspective in a 3D environment, and at first everything seems OK and familiar even if it looks different: you've still got an inventory, the primary character Zoë has a journal like April did and games like Gabriel Knight 3 and Grim Fandango had proven that the genre could not only translate to a 3D environment well but take advantage of the new dimension as well, the former in its freewheeling camera that made detective work more detective-y and the latter embracing its blocky 1998 3D aesthetics to create one of the most memorable worlds in the genre. Dreamfall doesn't do anything like that and it doesn't even attempt to: despite the new possibilities, Funcom strip down gameplay elements and this makes the game so linear that it's actually frustrating to play. The puzzles are perfunctory and roughly 95% of them boil down to the player interacting with an environmental object in one room, going to an adjacent room to pick up an item, and then using that item on the object. They take about 30 seconds to complete and feel like needless busywork to give the illusion that Dreamfall is an old-school puzzler; sometimes you even get to combine items (woo!), but even the separate parts can typically be found literally next to one another and so your job is to simply spend a few seconds in the menu before you can advance. The puzzles are so simple that halfway through I actually wished they weren't there to begin with, because all they do is slow down the narrative for no real reason - tasks to tick on a chore list before you get to play the game, highlighting the difference between easy puzzles and needless admin. Outside the """puzzles""" the gameplay consists of running around from one screen to the next, finding the next piece of spelled-out busywork to process or the next dialogue tree to navigate. The tedium is sometimes broken by minigames, one for lockpicking (actually decent) and hacking (as tedious as its narrative justification is contrived), everyone's favourite trend stealth sections (awkward and frustrating) and - in what is the most baffling decision - actual combat sequences. The infrequent brawling in the game feels like a precisely engineered dictionary example of a forced action mechanic that has been included purely for marketing purposes, forced by a publisher because of a hypothetical market increase. It is quite possibly the worst tacked-on combat element I've ever seen in a game but on the bright side it's also so easy thanks to its mindnumbing simplicity and bad AI that the only thing slowing the player down is waiting for the next wave to start.
You can also tell that Funcom were struggling with the development of the game in general. The mid-2000s were a particularly awkward time for PC gaming because of the demands set by the the massively expanded console market, and the hardware and control limitations of the Playstation and XBox compared to the PC could really mess with gaming studios who had formerly only ever developed with the PC audience in mind. At the time this was called consolitis and though the term reeks of PC gaming master race subreddits, behind the unfortunate name lies a genuine phenomenon describing botched attempts of concept and design streamlining when dealing with perhaps unexpected technical restrictions. Dreamfall may as well be the shining example of the consolitis era (together with Deus Ex: Invisible War) given how full it is of the traditional hallmarks of the syndrome. The already cramped gameplay areas are segmented to countless small zones where you spend as much time staring at loading screens as you do on travelsal, there's minimal interactivity within the environment itself that leads to an eery feeling of ghost towns and meaningless NPCs, and the menus are all super-sized yet at the same time lacking in actual information. The grand fantasy metropolis of Marcuria feels smaller in this game than it did in TLJ despite the possibilities the extra dimension could allow because it's been split into claustrophobic corridors full of artificial blocks, all its small sectors coming across hollow and devoid of life. The aforementioned journal that Zoë keeps is more of a microblog with a strict character limit and the emotional resonance of a "Hello Twitter, today I ate eggs for breakfast" style microblog, which is simply compared to April's lengthy journal rambles about her experiences in TLJ.
In summary, if The Longest Journey was an epic adventure that felt larger than life and conjured the most incredible vistas and scenes, Dreamfall behaves like you are walking the same three corridors each day and occasionally hearing someone in another room talk about the rest of the building, which you can't access because the stairways are blocked with ankle-high boxes, all the doors are locked and you're chained to the handrail.
This could be saved by the plot - after all, there are many great hyperlinear narrative adventures where you don't even detect the restrictions because the story is so captivating. To Funcom's credit, Dreamfall starts out very well and despite the gameplay interruptions, the game's initial narrative is a decent hook. Rather than directly continuing April Ryan's story, Dreamfall takes place some years after and introduces the recently ex-boyfriended university dropout Zoë Castillo who struggles to find meaning and focus in her life (and my gods is she going through textbook depression but the game very nicely doesn't awkwardly hammer this in so the player definitely gets it). Zoë's story arc starts small but despite some contrivances (her hacker friend is way too convenient and one-dimensional to ever feel like anything more than a gameplay proxy), her stumbling onto something far bigger than she can at first even comprehend soon begins to weave old familiar themes (and worlds and people) and new ideas together in a manner that compells, even on a replay (though I had forgotten some of the detail, once more). That is, at least, if you're a TLJ veteran, which is the perspective I'm coming from: the writing doesn't do a particularly good job of treating newcomers as well as it does veterans, and particular aspects (primarily most things Arcadia and some of the major characters and themes of April's original story) are never explained thoroughly enough so that someone new to the series could have a full grasp of what's happening and why.
You meet and get to play as April too, now almost a new character after a decade of feeling lost both physically and mentally following the events of TLJ but somewhere inside that gruff demeanour is something recognisable.
Then things start falling apart little by little. The further you dwell in the (mostly) Stark-side plot with Zoë the more it becomes a sequence of conspiracy clichés and seemingly random curveballs that are barely explained: there's ghost girls, corporate espionage action sequences, global conspiracies, secret pasts, corrupt megacorps etc. Eventually you lose track of what you're meant to actually pay attention on, and Zoë's character (and acting) seems to get less engaged the more you play and the more Zoë is meant to be focused on finding the answers to all the questions around her. While Zoë gets to visit Arcadia a couple of times, most of the time spent in the world of magic is split between the other two characters. April returns and after a decade wandering without meaning both mentally and physically following the events of TLJ, her initial gruff but still recognisably April demeanour transforms into a one-note, out-of-character nihilistic angst that torpedoes any dialogue she engages in. The third character, the religious zealot Kian who represents the foreign military might who has occupied Marcuria and which acts as the game's main antagonist faction, begins to appear more prominently from halfway point onwards and represents the lowest of the game's lows. He has the personality, presence and acting of a balsa wood chair, his story sequences feature the most action sequences out of all the characters and even though you can predict every single story beat of his arc the journey through it is still executed so haphazardly that it feels completely illogical and pulled out of thin air. Sometimes the wider issues of the game even end up affecting the narrative, as the different characters find themselves in the same recycled environments in Arcadia over and over again in what feels like contrivance dictated by asset reusage over any real narrative reason.
Much like TLJ Dreamfall does build to an emotional gut punch ending, which I vividly remembered completely throwing me off emotionally when I was younger and which haunted my mind for several days after the game finished. Without saying much more, it is still in some ways a very moving ending - but I didn't find it so powerful this time around because all I kept thinking is how badly the narrative ends if this is the only entry you'll ever play. Dreamfall is the middle part of a trilogy and like all the worst middle parts, it fires off oh so many cliffhangers and raises oh so many questions in the final stretches towards its credits roll, all of which are left unanswered and which leaves a bad taste in the mouth even as the game cranks up the emotional heft of the narrative in its last chapters. The power of the poignant ending is left dulled and dampened when you realise just how many central elements of the entire game so far had been left completely blank, when for half the game you don't know why you're doing something or what it is you're even doing to begin.
This is probably the third time I've played Dreamfall and each time I come away from it with more hesitations. Once the novelty - the return to the familiar things from the first game (particularly powerful if you had been aware of the original since 1999), experiencing the new plot for the first time, etc - has worn off, you start paying attention to everything else and you begin to see the holes. The plot and the characters are inconsistent and the gameplay is subpar, and once those start jumping on your face it's hard to pay attention to the good parts. Dreamfall straddles the fine line between bad and boring - it's an honestly middling gameplay experience and ultimately unsuccessful in most of its goals. It's a game that's going through a major identity crisis in so many ways, by developers who seemed to be second guessing what they wanted to achieve with this entry while also planning threads towards the next one, before they could even confirm there was ever going to be a third part. In my books, Dreamfall is one of the worst stumbles in quality within a series, the likes of which are rare to find to this extent.