Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chapters-the-longest-journey

Nothing else has to be said. Back it!!!!

No.

*checks for Mac support*

...hm. "We totally want to do a Mac version!" is not the same as "If you buy a copy, you will get to play it on your Mac!", so I guess I'll wait for this to hit Steam after it's actually made. Looks like a neat game, though, and I appreciate the thought.

Yes.

Backed. Holy crap do they have a lot of backers on the higher tiers. 129 people pledged $500, 14 people pledged $750, 21 pledged $1,000, 1 pledged $5,000, and one pledged $10,000. I don't have ten grand to give them, but they definitely have my support. The Longest Journey and Dreamfall are two of my all-time favorite games.

I'll get it when it's on Steam or GoG for $5.

Good to know.

Kindly stop with the grouching and leave us to our Happy Hamster Hop, would ya?

When Footmunch posted the news over in the General Kickstarter Thread, it totally made my day, scratch that, week. The Longest Journey and Dreamfall were beautifully written and I've kept hoping for the final chapter.

fadeaccompli : They mentioned something about Mac support and yet-to-be-announced stretch goals. Given that they've already hit half their funding on the second day I guess more info will be coming along soon.

Do you think the townsfolk will ever find Hamster Huey's head?

I am all for Mac support stretch goals!

...I mean, okay, every Kickstarter I've ever backed that promised Mac support via stretch goals still hasn't released a functional game for anyone, but that's Kickstarter for you. I will bookmark, and check back later.

$50 pledged, hell yes.

Can someone take the time to give me the brief pitch on this series as a whole? I only played a little bit of Dreamfall and I quit at some instant-fail stealth thing pretty early on because I just didn't want to deal. That said, I have always intended to go back to it and this seems a good a reason as any.

Dreamfall abruptly ends when the game starts approaching being interesting and then the creator faffs off to make shitty mmos for a decade.

I wouldn't play Dreamfall before playing The Longest Journey. It's a self-contained story with a new protagonist, but the setting and a number of key characters are from the first game, so you'll be missing out on a lot if you skip it.

Primary strengths of both games are the story and writing, which are among the best of any adventure game I have played. They both have some good puzzles; Dreamfall's puzzles tend to be more logical (if you need to open a door, you will probably do it with a key, not a French Horn and a bag of Gummi Bears), and a lot easier. TLJ has a couple of puzzles that veer into cat-mustache territory, so if that sort of thing annoys you, keep a walkthrough handy when you play, and make sure to break it out when you are in a back alley trying to figure out how to sneak into a theater, because you are never going to figure that one out on your own. Also, Dreamfall has a cliffhanger ending. Just so you know.

Both games are well-worth playing in spite of some odd issues like that.

You know, I may up my pledge to $50. I love the soundtracks from both previous games, so that's probably going to be a good extra.

Yes.

Well TLJ was a hella long, kinda creaky experience. Parts were awesome (The Gribbler), parts were goddamned horrible (The Monkey Dance), many of the puzzles were wtf-ish but it had a nice epic feel. It's from back in ye olde 2D sprites era, and it shows.

Dreamfall was a different beast altogether and by and large easier to play. And as Adree says, it gets going real good and ends on a cliffhanger so abrupt it explains to an extent why so many people are all SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY at the prospect of continuing the story.

Maybe they are Neal Stephenson fans.

I kind of think it goes far in explaining why I'm so disinterested in giving them my money.

I'm a fan of traditional point and click adventures. It annoyed me that Dreamfall strayed that far from what TLJ did so well. Which is why I gave Jane Jensen $50 for her Kickstarter.

This? Well, it says it's point and click some places, then indicates it uses Dreamfall's mechanics in other places. I'll give them my money when I see gameplay video.

I'd play Dreamfall on a bloody Etch-A-Sketch if that's what it takes. The strength of that series, for me, never was in the mechanics but in the story and the protagonists. I've rarely ever found a char as endearing as April in a book, let alone a game.

What I'm getting from this thread is that I should not play Dreamfall until this new game is out.

Sure. In much the same way you might not want to watch any part of a series like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings until the movies are all released.

Despite all the raving about story don't expect a masterpiece, this is a loved game because the plot goes right for the feels and we all played it as teenagers. I'd totally recommend starting with Dreamfall because the older game hasn't aged well and there's no important content overlap.

Or play through them both with a FAQ!

I prefer to think of TLJ as a standalone game. It makes the pain of that cliffhanger easier to bear. I'm pissed off at what Dreamfall did to April as well. She went from funny art student to whiny goth chick. Still, TLJ remains one of my favourite adventure games ever.

I played both games in my thirties, so now I feel old. they were and are awesome, though. TLJ holds up fine, and is definitely a prerequisite for Dreamfall. If nothing else, it would suck to not have any idea who April Ryan is going into the sequel. The first game also establishes a lot of stuff about the setting that is not explained again in Dreamfall. I would not recommend skipping the first game.

Me either, there is some great stuff done with how parts of the world have changed between the two games that I really enjoyed the impact of. Plus the first game has at least half of the great characters.

The whole series is a bit odd because it's quality rests on the world building and characters and the way that they are conveyed to you through the mechanics. Meanwhile the 'traditional' mechanics are occasionally terrible (Subway trapped item puzzle, April's apartment window puzzle, clown alley puzzle, music puzzle in Dreamfall, various beat-em up sections in Dreamfall). However it is a game series with moments that can really stick with you, I particularly love a part in Dreamfall when Zoe experiences a dramatic revelation in the plot that suddenly leaves her character without an immediate goal and the game reinforces that sense of aimlessness and loss by just leaving you to wander about as the player. Meanwhile the music changes up from it's normal ambient instrumental style to a piece with an emotional vocal and there is this little reflective break until the plot restarts a little later. Hard to describe without spoilers but I found it really well done.

Yeah, the puzzles in TLJ are weird and incomprehensible sometimes, but I'll never forget the moment when I finally figured out the monkey in the alley puzzle.

The Longest Journey: Stealing Eyeballs From Dudes Taking a Dump

There's a good 'spoiler-free' FAQ for the Longest Journey here - it's basically a list of hints for each section.

That was awesome! Especially since it's that same dude you poisoned with strange gutter fluid in another puzzle, and you're the reason that he's stuck in the washroom.

Oddly I got that one quite quickly, it just made sense to me. The opening chapter of TLJ was by far my favourite bit, it always had two or three puzzles going at a time so when you got stuck on one you could switch to another. It was like something out of the golden age of point & click. I felt it went off the rails a little once it introduced its main narrative, but it did have an oddly epic feel to it.

I never finished it because it turned out the CD copy didn't work on Vista. I've got it on Steam waiting for me to go back and finish it.

I didn't find the puzzles in TLJ too tough, even if they sometimes pushed well past the bounds of sanity and jarred against the game's sometimes-serious tone. I did think that it was a bit overrated, but solid.

(The subway puzzle made LESS sense to me than the cat mustache, and that's saying something.)

I never played Dreamfall. I'm more of a classic adventure game fan, and hearing about the dubious ending turned me off. That said, it's great to see someone doing that kind of world-building in an adventure, and I'll cautiously look forward to this.

Sarah Hamilton, voice of April Ryan, confirmed to be in Dreamfall Chapters woot

You should play it anyway. Game contains serious feels.

It would have been a Much Shorter Journey had a third installment been released too soon thereafter.

What does this mean?

This entertainment product contains a statistically significant level of content rated 'emotionally triggering' by the 84th Grognard Council of Antwerp and as such was deemed 'unsuitable' for inclusion in the ring binder of logical purity.

It means that April (and Zoe, too) is a really sweet, touching and believeable heroine. One scene that sticks out in my memory is when she gets told that (old fantasy cliche ahoy) she'll have to face her worst fear, and, in a really small voice (her voice actress did a fantastic job with the char, I'm happy she's back), she answers, "Spiders?" Such small details really brought across that, Chosen One or not, April's just a normal young woman who finds herself into a situation way beyond anything she ever imagined.

The first stretch goals have been announced, btw, and since Mac/Linux support is the very first of them, you should be fine, fadeaccompli.

I want all of those stretch goals.