Dreamfall Chapters

The first session with Dreamfall Chapters has been... interesting. I'd been hoping to complete the first episode (or book) today of what is currently four - I have no idea when the fifth is supposed to arrive given it's been half a year since the last one - but the game moves extremely slowly. I don't just mean plotting-wise either; as the first chapter of the game I can forgive a certain amount of catch-up and table-setting, especially since it's been nine years since a lot of players last spent time with these characters. Rather, either due to the technical limitations of my computer or some other issue, everything seems to move in slow-motion and the dialogue has these big, long pauses between each line. I don't think the first chapter was meant to take this long to complete: all I've really done is complete two of its chapters, each of which only required three or four mini-puzzles each. I'll be messing around with the settings for tomorrow's continuation to move things along quicker, at any rate, where I hope to at least complete the first two books and possibly follow with the final two on day three.

What this shortcoming does provide - a silver lining, as it were - is an opportunity to create spoiler-filled recounts of the books I've played through tomorrow and Friday, while preserving today for general impressions on the game and setting everything up for those unfamiliar with the series so that anyone can read today's update without it revealing too much. Like most episodic adventure games, a lot of what's worth remarking upon relates to the strength of the narrative, both in terms of plotting and how that plot is delivered, and what tends to make accounts of these games valuable is discussing the ever-ubiquitous "big choices" that each game requires of you at certain points in the story. Given that almost all of that might potentially spoil a first playthrough, I'll save it for the updates to come.

Dreamfall Chapters is, collectively, the third and probably final installment of The Longest Journey series which began way back in 1999. The Longest Journey's sequel and the immediate predecessor to Dreamfall Chapters, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, was released in 2006, so it's a series that has always taken its sweet time for each new installment. The heroine from the second game onward is Zoe Castillo, a former bioengineering student from Casablanca who begins that game having lost her sense of purpose in life and embarks on a dangerous and exciting adventure after a close reporter friend of hers goes missing. Whereas the first game was a standard graphic adventure point-and-click, Dreamfall went for something a bit closer to "action-adventure", with combat mini-games and stealth sections thrown in for flavor. Those sections didn't quite work out, but the game's script and puzzles were fortunately as strong as ever. As for the overall story, there's a little too much of it to get into detail here but it essentially tells of two worlds - the magically-inclined Arcadia and the technologically-driven Stark, the latter of which is our world - and a deep connection between them that suggests that when one is threatened, so is the other. It began with a whole bunch of malarkey about some feuding magical immortal dragons, the delicate balance of energies between the two worlds and, most recently, an attempt to destabilize both by attacking people through their dreams. Frequently, the games in this series split their time between the fantasy trappings of Arcadia and the near-future sci-fi of Stark, all the while creating parallels between the two distinct settings that help the player get to the bottom of whatever's threatening both worlds that week.

Naturally, I don't hate the game. Wouldn't want to keep playing if that was the case. I do feel like the modern episodic adventure game format and its now-established balance of minimal puzzle design and maximum "make a choice and maybe regret it later" story-shifting decisions does the world of Dreamfall/The Longest Journey a disservice in some respects; for one, the game was never about moral choices, because while the characters they presented could be troubled and conflicted, they always did what was right in the end. That's just how the forward motion in these types of stories happen to work. Zoe and Kian, who appear to be the game's protagonists this time around, both had arcs filled with suffering and self-doubt that allowed them to grow as distinct characters throughout the events of Dreamfall, though all too often in these episodic games the developers try to let the player take their own interpretation of the story by presenting dilemmas that determine how those characters react to situations and will adjust their personalities based on those choices. That's fine when you're creating characters from whole cloth, but it doesn't work as well when you're using pre-established personalities with their own clearly defined moral compasses and beliefs. You could rationalize that the present flexibility of their personalities is due to how their respective worldviews/faith have been shaken by the tragic events at the end of the second game, and the intervening months between that game and this one, but I'm not sure it's all really sitting right. Some of the decisions so far have been fairly weak too, though that might have more to do with the writing than anything else. Either way, they don't feel like they belong, at least not yet.

Otherwise, the game is as well-written and well-realized as the others in its series, and even though I've barely got past the game's reintroduction of its two main characters (the third is, uh, presently occupied? With being dead? Maybe? Probably?), I appreciate that they've apparently switched back to the less action-oriented gameplay of the first game. I hope it continues to do well by the legacy it's been shaping these seventeen long years, and finally bring closure to some mysteries and cliffhangers that many fans of this series have been waiting to see concluded for almost a decade (though for me it's only been a year, thankfully). If nothing else, I'm glad this game exists for that reason.

Be sure to come by tomorrow for a detailed rundown of the first (and hopefully second) books and the rationalization behind the choices I made. I'll include an opening paragraph or two discussing general non-spoilery updates too, just to keep those who have yet to play the game in the loop regarding my ever-mutable perspective as I get further in. (Looking to create something like the rundowns in my Life is Strange playthrough from December, for reference.)

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