I discussed last time that the first half of this Book is to bring our two main characters off the bench and back into the active roster. Or something sports-related to that effect. I suck at that kind of metaphor. Stark inhabitant and former bioengineering student turned world-hopping secret agent Zoe Castillo was left in a coma at the end of Dreamfall, while Azadi Apostle and all-round badass Kian Alvane was caught redhanded by his rival Commander Vamon conversing with April Ryan, the heroine of the first game and leader of a rebel faction, shortly before the Azadi had her killed and Kian imprisoned. It was one heck of a cliffhanger, to say the least, and after nine years (though in-game it's closer to just one) it was time to emancipate the two of them from their unfortunate positions.

Zoe has managed to pull a Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and is rescuing sleeping people Dream Warriors style from their lucid nightmares in an inter-dimensional space called Storytime. She's been here for months, passing from spectral dream avatar to spectral dream avatar, helping them to overcome whatever fears have trapped them in this place. You get to play through a few of these scenarios - a woman dreaming about constantly falling, a man scared of the dark and unable to cope, and a young girl who is terrified of the monster in her closet. These puzzles are solved with a handful of curious superhero abilities that Zoe can utilize in this dimension: one brings light, one lets her read the minds of the dream ghosts, and the last slows time down. The game has some fun building a handful of puzzles around these mechanics, before it decides to strip them from you once it becomes clear that Zoe has to wake up. So, after having a Persona-style heart-to-heart with an avatar of herself, she decides to do just that. The first big important choice of the game pops up here: does she go back to her old life, or try to forge a new one? I opted for a fresh start, if only because Zoe talked frequently about burning her bridges due to the twist that her father had been lying to her about her not-so-dead mother all this time. With a new life, she could move to a different city and try to rebuild from scratch.

Kian, meanwhile, is about to face an early execution from a clearly worried about something Vamon before a jailbreak manages to bust him out. It meant the sacrifice of the cool sea captain from Dreamfall to power the blood magic needed for a portal out of there, which isn't something I'm sure Kian would approve of even if he wasn't already raised to fear and hate magic of all kinds. He's given little choice but to then join the city of Marcuria's Resistance against his fellow Azadi - a vaguely Asian, vaguely African civilization which abhors magic and magical sentient races due to a stringent theocratic society. This sequence simply involves moving up the jail tower to the roof, which involves a few inventory puzzles and then bullshitting your way past the unctuous warden. The game's second and third choice hits here: mercy kill a dying prisoner to save him from being tortured for information, or let him be recaptured alive? as well as kill the warden or let him live? It seems like the vast majority let the first die and the second live. As did I, as Kian had given his word to that effect in both cases, and it's not like the warden is made to be entirely unsympathetic (though he sure looks like a little fantasy Hitler). The game doesn't do much with Kian after getting him out of prison, however, letting us ponder his fate as Vamon gets in a couple of revolver shots as Kian reluctantly escapes through the portal.

We're then taken back to Zoe where we get a full sense of what she's been up to since waking up, as the game skips ahead some three months: she woke up without her memories of the events of Dreamfall, convenient given the amount of information she has about Arcadia, the dream world, the conspiracy behind the "Dreamachine" devices and what may or may not be a doppelganger hiding as her ex-boyfriend Reza. Forgetting that she's supposed to be suspicious of Reza, she decides to build a new life with him in Propast, a district of the Europe-encompassing Europolis where Prague used to be. She presently works as an intern for a expletive-hurling technical whiz and her silent partner as they repair and repurpose old robots and sell them onto private vendors, and lives in a tiny apartment with crappy ventilation. So far, so twenty-something. This chapter's mostly about getting used to running around Propast and completing a list of objectives, all of which involve the aptly named Shitbot as it humorously fails at one career after another. This chapter then moves onto Zoe's volunteer work as a gofer for what she considers to be the least disappointing political candidate running for Mayor of Propast. This involves trying to win over a local underworld figure with some influence on the local downtrodden - the awesome Queenie, who can read Zoe like a book - and agreeing to help her find a pickpocket urchin named Hanna to earn her support. Zoe also goes to visit Reza at his place of work, the underground investigative journalist outfit The Hand That Feeds.

The last big decision of this Book involves either arguing with Reza over his controlling attitude or letting it slide for a quiet night in; the implication being that their relationship is tumultuous and may fall apart at any moment. They did originally split up for a reason, after all, and we're still not sure whether this Reza can be trusted. Even so, I chose not to argue; Zoe deserves some peace.

Before moving onto the next book, I just want to go over the characters that are introduced in Book 1. They'll play significant roles in the Books to follow, and also because I really like a handful of them. There's Zoe's food-cart friend and local Marxist Nela, who is frequently getting hassled by the ominous EYE patrolmen that have clamped Propast down under a martial law that the game has yet to explain; there's Mira and Wit, Zoe's dubious employers, and it's from the former we get many of the game's best lines, albeit ones filled with ableist slurs and strings of cusses; there's the outspoken editor Sully, who works with Reza at the Hand That Feeds and openly flirts with Zoe in a boisterous Hakan way that doesn't feel at all creepy somehow; Zoe's manager for her political volunteer work, the idealistic Baruti Maphane with some rad hexagon-hair; the wise old underworld matriarch Queenie, who might be a familiar archetype but at least she's way better than the uncomfortable "Chinese Merchant" stereotype in Dreamfall; and then the awesome but dead Captain Bachim, who chose to run himself through to save Kian when Kian wasn't up to the task of murdering the badass pirate that had helped him jailbreak. We'll be seeing more of all of those (except the Captain) in Book 2, and probably the Books to follow.

Last, though, we have to address the final enigmatic interlude that concludes Book 1: the infant Saga, and her meeting with a spectral figure I think we're supposed to assume is the deceased White Dragon from the first two games. Saga apparently lives in an inter-dimensional homestead with her parents, one of whom is green and glittery, and I suspect that there's some serious destiny afoot for this baby. It's fun to play an adventure game as an infant though. Might well be doing that again later this month...

Rebels sure felt a lot longer than the first, but really it's only because it was stacked with more puzzles and running around, and not so much with story stuff. We get a whole lot more Kian this time, as he begins this Book by meeting his fellow resistance members - including Likho, who does not get on well with Kian at all, what with Kian having cut down his father and all - and taking his first assignment for the cause. This is actually three assignments: meeting The Mole, who is revealed to be the wiliest and possibly the last of the subterranean Banda people from the first game; setting a shipment of Azadi weapons (guns, of course) to explode, which leads to the game's aforementioned "not stealth at all" section as you put a fuse together while avoiding a patrolling guard; and uncovering a turncoat by sneaking into a meeting of a racist faction working with the Azadi against the magical sentient races and later identifying the same guy in the magical slums via his odor. Again, these feel like minor assignments intended to get the player used to running around the new-look Arcadian city of Marcuria, which returns once again from the first and second games.

We then return to Zoe, who has been explaining her dreams to her therapist Dr. Zelenka (isn't he a Stargate Atlantis character? Is this supposed to be a reference?) who the game chooses to reveal to the player as being in cahoots with the same shadowy agent that's been monitoring her through Reza. Whoever this Toht-like fellow works for, and I assume it's the evil congolmerate WATICorp from Dreamfall, they're very curious about how much Zoe can remember about the Dreamachine conspiracy she supposedly helped to foil. What follows is another bunch of assignments - help Baruti track down where his and Zoe's political party's funding is coming from, continuing to help Queenie track down her teenage runaway contact, and once again trying to patch things up with Reza at his place of work. These tasks eventually overlap: Baruti and Zoe's benevolent mayoral candidate is shown to not only be in cahoots with her fascistic rival candidate but also the EYE-controlling corporate-funded Syndicate, which leads to Zoe either choosing to give Baruti the incriminating data or disseminating it to the public via Sully and Reza's The Hand That Feeds. Naturally, I went with the latter; it seemed far too obvious what would happen if you let a disillusioned Baruti take the priceless info to his crooked candidate and demand answers. Baruti didn't seem to happy with my decision, though at least there's a hint that he survived the ordeal in a later sequence. Hanna, meanwhile, turned out to have some connection to the same dreams Zoe is having, and I'm highly suspicious that a character with the same hair color and the name Anna appeared in Arcadia at the same time to lend assistance to Kian. It's hard to say if either Hanna or Anna can be trusted yet, but they seem to play a major role in the events to come. Neither of them have too forthcoming yet, however.

The game then switches back to Kian for a shorter stay in Marcuria, as the Resistance get a tip about a big raid on what's left on the magical sentient citizens of the city by the Azadi. Kian spends some time solving some irritating puzzles about "sand-witches" and fireworks to get the info he needs, but the mistrustful Likho decides to ignore it and the raid goes ahead as planned. Meanwhile, Zoe discovers that the Hand That Feeds has been closed down by EYE, who managed to intercept the big story before it went out, and follows a suspiciously-acting Nela after the latter hands Zoe a package to take care of for a short time. Nela then heads to the EYE HQ to blow herself up spectacularly for her Communist comrades, and a badly hurt and unconscious Zoe who was not able to escape the blast radius is dragged away by an unseen figure as the chapter ends.

Obviously with three more Books to go there's a lot of story left to see, but with this Book it felt like the game wanted to ratchet things up a few gears after the relatively sedate and newbie-welcoming first Book. Already, characters are dying left and right and we're seeing the disastrous results of some early decisions. We have a couple more cliffhangers to resolve for next time, and after these events it's unsure how much longer Zoe will stay in Propast, or Kian in Marcuria. Damn, and I've only just gotten used to the maps of those two places.

For the record, here are the big decisions we were required to make:

• Calling out Na'ane as a traitor or keeping silent - This is more or less addressing a sorta plot hole from the end of Dreamfall, where Kian manages to meet April Ryan for the last time due to him strong-arming her confidante and the Resistance's healer, Na'ane, for the information on her location. You can then choose to be a total dick and expose her to the Resistance as the traitor that allowed April to be discovered by the Azadi agent chasing her (as in, you) or talk to her later in private about the matter. I chose to keep her sins a secret for now; if I'm being given a chance to redeem myself, it strikes me as hypocritical to not allow her the same opportunity. Especially since I was the one that forced her hand in the first place.
• Warn Queenie about the Unity party or accept her support as well as tell Queenie where Hanna is hiding or keep it a secret: Both of these appear right at the end of Queenie's mission to track Hanna down, which involves the game's most obtuse puzzle yet (it involves getting the attention of one of the thousands of ad-bots floating around the city, and using its sales pitch as a distraction). Queenie's depicted as a trustworthy character who appreciates honesty and loyalty, so I chose to warn her about the political party I was in the process of exposing as well as keeping Hanna's location a secret after Hanna asked me to.
• Give Baruti the incriminating evidence or give it to The Hand That Feeds. See above.
• Torture or Threaten the Azadi captain for information, and then also Kill or Spare the Azadi captain. I'm not really playing Kian as a psychopath, since most of his storyline has been about finding redemption after his bloody life as a peerless Apostle of the Azadi, so I opted for the least violent approach both times. It may have caused more damage however, since Likho wasn't as quick to believe the information as he might've been if I tortured the poor sap for it. Likewise, he didn't approve that I let him go and accused me of choosing the Azadi over the magical races, though his companion Enu saw the tactical advantage of keeping the guy around as a spy instead. Incidentally, they set that guy up to be a racist child molester purely so I might more inclined to kill him, and fuck that. That's a weak-ass play at moral relativism. No enlightened person chooses to kill a guy because his crimes make him a colossal asshole, though letting him go with the threat of revealing that information to his superiors (which will lead to a very unpleasant death, we're informed) might've been too lenient. (And hey, I chose to kill Whoreson Junior in The Witcher 3, so maybe I do have my limits.)

I could go through all the characters in the Resistance - Likho, the blue warrior with a chip on his shoulder; Enu, the chatty catgirl comic relief who frequently slips into TMI mode; the weird deer lady ringleader Shepard - but they don't feel particularly significant. Not yet anyway.