The Longest Journey: Adventure Game of the Year Edition

• Dreamfall: The Longest Journey
• Secrets of the Ark: Broken Sword IV
• Syberia 2
• Syberia
• the Black Mirror

The game spans four CDs and needs all that space to hold both the gorgeous graphics and hours of high-quality speech. Everyone you meet has plenty to say, and you'll want to listen to everything because the game contains some of the most brilliant voice acting ever recorded. Each character has such a distinct and engaging voice that you could play this game with your eyes closed and it would maintain much of its beauty, although you likely won't want to blink after your first glimpse of the game's detailed environments. The graphics run at a feeble maximum resolution of 640 x 480 but are packed with enough atmosphere and animation that they look great even on a large monitor.

The Longest Journey obviously excels from a technical standpoint, but it's the writing that really makes it memorable. April maintains a diary that can be read to give players further insight into the game's strange events, and into April's mind as well. Lengthy conversations that seem tedious at first later serve to really make you care about the game's characters. They become more than simply people who exist to dispense items or tell you where to go next, and it's fascinating to watch April develop as she slowly absorbs the gravity of the situation into which she's been thrust. This game may seem like the longest--and most boring--journey at the beginning, but after a few hours adventure fans and anyone else who likes a good story will probably wish it would never end. (Note to readers: this game has an ESRB rating of Mature, and contains a lot of adult language.) --T. Byrl Baker

Pros:

Let's take a look at the blow-by-blow:

1. But it's got gorgeous graphics -- Ok, the scenery's pretty. Know what? So was the scenary in Myst, and that suckers a good 5+ years older than TLJ. And let's keep in mind that when people are raving about the graphics, they're referring to the SCENERY; if it moves in the game (i.e. the characters), then its blocky and clunky. I've seen better quality in full motion video games than the character models in this thing.

2. The voice acting -- Yeah, it's good, which indeed is a rarity these days. I must confess that I found the main character annoying after a while, but the voice acting was certainly top-notch. But what good is voice acting when . . . .

3. They never shut up -- That's right. Never. Never ever. And every time you meet a character, you're going to find these enourmous dialogue trees, with layers on layers of their childhood, their sexual proclivities, their hopes, their dreams, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And, in true adventure game style, you never know which little bit is going to yield that crucial bit of information that you need to progress the game. So you sit and you listen and you pray for death to come.

4. The story is just lame -- Maybe I just have a chip on my shoulder, but what kind of hippie, new age, gobbledy-gook is this? What was the writer smoking? I'm quite forgiving, particularly in the realm of sci-fi and fantasy, but this thing is just trite and uninspiring. My favorite thing about the game is that it'll put some outlandish rule out there, which normally I'd just accept without thinking, but then they try and EXPLAIN it, and it makes no sense. For example:

* Crazy outlandish rule -- So there needs to be a new Guardian every 1000 years. * Me -- Gotcha. 1000 years. New Guardian. Check * Expository character who can't stop rambling -- Oh but there's a good reason for the 1000 year cap: the soul can't be separated from the body for longer than that. * Me -- HUH?!?!?!

5. It's still all the annoyances of adventure gameplay -- To top it all off, you're still going to be bogged down in the apparently unbreakable rules of an adventure game: A) If you know what you need, but you can't find it, examine every stinking thing in your inventory 'cause it's probably hidden inside something else B) If you know you need to use something in a specific way, but it just doesn't seem to work, you probably simply haven't placed the object in PRECISELY the right spot to trigger the action C) When all else fails, spend half and hour blindly trying to combine items in your inventory, and waving inventory items across the screen. With any luck, you'll stumble across the completely unintuitive Rube-Goldbergian contraption/technique that the game's designers decided was the only possible way to open a window. If you're less lucky, it means you don't have the right item, so go revisit every location and try to pick up everything you can. Once you've got something new, repeat blind inventory combining and/or waving until you're allowed to proceed to the next 20 minute monologue on the Balance and the Disc and the Key which is the Disc which has been broken into four which are the keys of the Disc for the Balance.

(...) I hope so so that I can run out and enjoy that root canal I've been putting off.

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