 "A masterpiece" | 2006-06-03 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3K0BM21SCZ62O |
This game is simply one of the best PC games, and the best PC adventure game, ever made.
I first heard about this game after playing and enjoying Syberia I and II. They are similar point-and-click adventure puzzle-solving games, with a strong central character and intriguing storyline. However, I quickly discovered that, if the Syberia titles are thought of as appetizing hors d'oeuvres, then The Longest Journey is a full five-course meal with all the trimmings!
The main reason this game stands out compared with other adventure games is the extremely deep storyline and characters. There is lots of dialogue, so it is not for people with short attention spans. The voice-acting is absolutely superb. The actress who plays April Ryan, the central character, deserved an Oscar (if such things exist for PC game acting).
April is the lynchpin of the whole game, and if you are like me you will quickly fall in love with her. What makes her so appealing is her whacky sense of humour. April is always wise-cracking, and is guaranteed to make you crack up even when all she is doing is routine game-mechanic stuff like: you can't go through that door, you can't combine those objects, etc. The many other characters she meets in the course of her adventures are also well-acted and often extremely comical.
The fact that the game doesn't take itself too seriously helps the player come to terms with the hocus-pocus storyline and often highly improbable situations and puzzles. That said, the story, which takes many hours to complete, is also extremely deep, absorbing and often moving. April proves herself to be a genuine heroine, who triumphs against her own insecurity as well as the many bizarre challenges she faces in the course of her travels.
Without wanting to give too much away, it's an epic Wizard-of-Oz, Alice-in-Wonderland style fantasy adventure, where April goes to all sorts of weird and wonderful places and meets all sorts of weird and wonderful characters and creatures. Along the way she has to save the world, which involves getting out of one sticky situation after another.
You'll notice that so far I have heaped all this praise on the game without even touching on the actual gameplay! If you've played inventory-based, point-and-click adventures, then The Longest Journey's game mechanics are a pretty standard affair, but great fun for all that. In general I found that the puzzles were not-too-easy and not-too-difficult. They were nicely-challenging without becoming frustrating. True, there is one particularly notorious puzzle near the start, but you'll crack it with patience.
If you enjoy this game as much as I did you will feel emotionally drained at the end of it. I was sad when it was all over, and missed April and her friends. I hope that the recently released sequel, Dreamfall, will capture at least some of the magic of this wonderful game. |
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| "Quick Tip:" | 2006-02-15 |
| - Reviewed By User: AJY81ZRWDBQF5 |
If you are considering buying this game but are apprehensive because of complaints of too much dialogue or walking time, there's an extremely easy way to fix it so the game goes much quicker:
-there is a SUBTITLES option in the options menu
-you can press ESCAPE to skip through animations or dialogue
With the subtitles on you can just read through the dialogues, then press escape when you're done- it makes things go waaaay quicker. Escape also allows you to skip walking around and other animations, so it takes barely any time to go long distances. That said, you have to be careful not to miss something because you're going too fast, and its worth it to listen to the dialogue every once in a while because its (for the most part) well written and generally well acted as well.
This is definitely one of the better games I've ever played, and worth the time just for the story. It was very easy to become attached to the characters- I soon found myself whistling for Crow even when he was not needed in the hopes of having a little chat. :-) The puzzles are generally fairly straightforward, with only a very few being obtuse to the point of annoyance. Some of them are actually a little contrived, but like I said- what really made the game was the personalities. Extremely enjoyable and highly recommended.
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 "Yack Yack Yack" | 2006-01-09 |
| - Reviewed By avsam1416 |
| This game is nice, good puzzles and problem solving skills. The problem....too much TALKING....alot of what some of the characters have to say is purely BORING. Keep the dialoge direct and to the point the game would have been much better. Not one of their better games. |
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| "Great Game" | 2005-02-28 |
| - Reviewed By andyfromva |
I'm normally a strategy gamer but I heard so much about The Longest Journey, I decided to try it. I bought it used from Amazon, and have been playing it nonstop since I received it.
The story is excellent so far - it could stand on its own as a fantasy novel. The writing is great. Some people have criticized the game for the use of 4 letter words, but the dialog really reflects the way young people speak. Most people, if they're honest, will admit that they spoke that way when they were 20.
My only quibble with the game is that some of the solutions to the puzzles were too obscure. I believe that, without internet access, lots of players will not be able to finish the game. This would be a shame, as the story and dialog are so good, everyone who plays should be allowed to play through to the end, even if they can't solve the puzzles. |
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| "Disappointing at best" | 2005-02-10 |
| - Reviewed By mark-these-words |
I can usually approach media with the sense that it comes from a certain time or period. But when I bought The Longest Journey based on the positively glowing reviews, I expected to be wowed regardless of technical limitations. I expected not just one of the best adventure games ever, but "one of the best games ever."
I have played other games in the adventure genre and what I found reassuring, I suppose, is that it would give you gentle guidance on where to go and what to do. Even if it ended up killing you, you would be able to eliminate one possibility.
The case is not so with The Longest Journey, and this was what I found to be merely one of the very frustrating aspects to the game. In each new area I would become stuck, knowing exactly what I was *supposed* to be doing, but not knowing what to do in order to trigger the event. Eventually I learned that I had to talk to characters an inordinate amount of times to trigger everything that I was supposed to. This took away from the flow of the game by forcing me to backtrack often, and to listen to a lot of text 5 minutes long that could really be simplified into 5 sentences.
It's not that I don't enjoy dialogue, either. I love hearing the characters come to life through inflection, but I need something more than a bare wall to stare at while I'm listening. All of the character faces are animated, I can see them moving as the characters speak, but we never are close enough to see them. This seems like an especially poor decision to always distance the player from the people involved. That is also why I put in a recommendation for Knights of the Old Republic instead of this game. KOTOR manages to spend the majority of the time talking, and still not seem boring about it. It's not that I'm a slave to graphics, either. Blade Runner managed to be an excellent adventure game in all its pixellated goodness, and Bad Mojo is one of my favorite adventure games of all time. But all these games shared a deep connection with the characters involved, which brings me to my next point.
The story, supposedly the selling point of most adventure games, seemed lackluster and very, very anticlimactic to me in this game. Often there would be characters that would be introduced or placed in danger, and I knew I was expected to feel some sort of response for that, but the encounters between characters were often either too short or not focused on the characters themselves, leaving me confused why they were placed in the game at all except as a deus ex machina, a vehicle to conveniently push the character forward. Furthermore this left me confused as to why the lead character, April, should care so much about people she had just met, and made it very hard for me to relate to her.
Next, the puzzles, supposed to be the secondary focus of adventure games, were sometimes very easy (inventory items and on-screen hotspots accounted for most of this) or much too obscure. (Maerum temple, anyone?)
I was never given any indication of how to solve any of the puzzles, although most of them I figured out through a bit of foresight and some tedious errand girl running back and forth. To me that doesn't make a very "fun" game. That makes a frustratiing and needlessly nitpicky game.
Finally, and I realize this is a bit of a cheap call, but the ending was pretty lame in my opinion. It answered no questions, gave no excuses, and seemed altogether too sure of itself. It seemed to me as if the screen faded to credits, and the developers turned to the player to say "See? Wasn't that *amazing*?"
The game was at its best when it first introduced a new area or character, because it was then that I was filled with that sense of wonder and anticipation characteristic of many adventure gaes, but I was consistently disappointed with the results due to a lack of technical prowess and an insanely disappointing lack of intuitive gameplay.
I would suggest looking at other games first, most especially KOTOR, but even something as moderately entertaining as "Primal" on PS2 has this game beat, I'm afraid.
With some hope, the sequel, an action-adventure hybrid, will feature a more close relationship with its main characters, not to mention a better concentration on contextual rather than incidental storytelling. |
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| "Perhaps the best adventure game ever." | 2004-06-24 |
| - Reviewed By doranobaka |
| I am not joking. No, this game is not particularly innovative like King's Quest (which basically put the genre on the map), but I would consider it to be the culmination of all that is good in adventure gaming. The main character, April Ryan, is very sympathetic and well-rounded; the supporting cast, even the characters who aren't on-screen for very long, are all vivid and well characterized; the environments are simply incredible; the plot is incredibly engaging; and, most importantly, when you finish this game, you will be left with a lot to honestly THINK about. The gameplay itself is actually pretty average; it's a point-and-click interface (pretty standard for the genre), though some of the artwork used in the interface is highly amusing. The game itself has a very quirky sense of humor which is usually experienced by touching and looking at everything you can. Overall, I would recommend this to any fan of the adventure game genre, and also to fans of RPGs with long, involved, and thought-provoking plots. Even though there is little branching, the replay value is rather high simply because the characters are that compelling (and because you'll notice details on further play-throughs which make the plot really come together). |
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