At the end of middle-school, I was an under-performing weird kid, quiet with virtually no fashion sense, the kind of guy who would wear a corduroy jacket to gym-class and pajamas under my pants because, I dunno it was comfortable I guess. The Longest Journey, that’s the first iteration, came out way back in 2000, when I was but a young teen of 14 years old. So, yes, some background, that’s a good place to start. I’d better digress as I still have a lot to talk about here. That got heavy, I’m getting emotional just writing this. Lady Alvane reminisces in her “House of All Worlds” in Dreamfall: Chapters. that sort of preemptive nostalgia for the good old days of “right now”, that gets me every time, because nothing and no one lasts forever and that’s something we all have to deal with. I’m not a very nostalgic person, but that. That I could just stop time, even for five minutes and enjoy the absolute stillness and lack of pressure, because one day, as the passage of time dictates, I’ll be a Lady Alvane myself, looking at old pictures of those places and people long gone and wishing I could have one more chat with them, maybe even embrace them. well, not crying exactly, no tears were shed, but sighing, just a bit, at the temporal nature of the universe, and wishing that like this game, chapters of my life could be as replayable as the ones in Dreamfall. When, I got to the final scene in the epilogue wherein Lady Alvane is looking at all her memorabilia of past adventures, reminiscing about various dimensions and all the characters that had come and gone, characters that you’d talked to, played as, did tasks for, shared stories with, I couldn’t stop myself from. In a way, this game series has been part of my life for the last 18 years as I’d played the games as they had been released from the first installment when I was about 14 years of age to now, at 31. Putting all the games together and playing them back to back was like a flood of nostalgia bringing back memories and moments of my life I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I remembered some scenes vividly but for the most part it was fuzzy. I mean I beat the game before, two years ago, when the last chapter was initially released but at that point the previous two games were hazy. I decided it was time for my playthrough and yesterday I finished the final chapter of the The Final Cut. Several months ago the time was right, the first two games went on sale and Dreamfall : The Final Cut was released. After completing Dreamfall: Chapters for the first time a few years ago I decided, if I had the time, I’d give the entire series a sequential play-through as I’d forgotten a lot of what happened between installments, all the games were available on steam and I figured the nostalgia trip would be a bit of fun. That being said, I still love this series to death and that love has only grown, as I have as a person. When you first encounter Newport, there is little to tip you off that it, in fact, exists in technologically-advanced cyberpunk future. The second game, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey gives off just a hint of the stench of publisher meddling with a terribly integrated combat system and somewhat clunky controls.Īnd the third, most recent iteration, Dreamfall: Chapters was produced by a team, the fraction of the size of the original’s and as such contains some of the usual indie-trappings such as a noticeable lack of character model diversity, a few noticeable bugs, and slow down here and there. These, now outdated, aesthetic choices combined with the at times unintuitive and down-right obtuse puzzle design (culminating in the often lambasted and always infamous “inflatable-duck/clamp puzzle” - you know the one) render it very much “of it’s time”. It’s steeped in late 90’s/early 2000’s archetypes (if you’ve played the game recently you’ll know what I mean) and chock-full of pre-rendered backgrounds and pixelated cutscenes that make you think there’s something wrong with your resolution or that your graphics card is on the fritz - “no games just looked like that back then, the options do nothing, put the screw-driver down and keep playing”. The first game, The Longest Journey has not aged well. The games have a special place in my heart both as pieces of nostalgia from my formative years but also as an example of how good videogame writing can get when you don’t opt to cater to the lowest common denominator. Dreamfall ? (the name sort of changed at one point) franchise have never been perfect games, but they’ve always kept me coming back and for almost twenty years as a matter of fact - that’s pretty good I’d say. Ragnar Tørnquist series of adventure games, comprising the.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |