Hey all. You might, or probably might not, recall that after completing the first three Books of Red Thread Games' episodic adventure game Dreamfall Chapters - a continuation of Ragnar Tornquist's true-to-its-name The Longest Journey series - that I opted to take a breather on playing and reviewing Book 4 until the release of Book 5, that I might seamlessly move from one to the next and not be left hanging in suspense too long. Well, my friends, shortly after E3 was over Book 5: Redux has indeed come out - it was released last Friday on the 17th of June. Dreamfall Chapters is now "complete", though I've yet to discover if the same is true for Zoe Castillo's story and that of the twin worlds of Stark and Arcadia, and that means it's due time I finished off the series I began in the midst of this year's May Mastery feature last month. For the sake of additional convenience, that would be Day 18, Day 19 and Day 20 of May's marathon blogging.

My recapping "style" thus far has been one borne of expediency, as a daily blog series is no place for patient, deliberate rumination and the exploration of themes, characters and symbolism. I'm half-tempted to summarize the entire trilogy of games in order to fill the gaps, let alone just the first three Books of this episodic series, but I think that'd probably be too much pre-amble. This game isn't going to make a lot of sense to those who aren't already familiar with the first two games anyway, which are still readily available (and highly recommended!) on Steam and GOG. For the time being, I'm going to continue as I've done before, focusing on the decisions I made and the handful of puzzles and gameplay sequences that each Book contains. The former would be more of interest to someone who has already played the game and perhaps chosen differently, and the latter is generally what I'm most invested in as a fan of these adventure games. I'll probably embellish the retelling with a few footnotes here and there on specific characters too - there are some that have risen to prominence in Book 4 (and presumably Book 5) that were either sidelined or briefly mentioned before now, and understanding where they came from is vital to understanding their present role. For instance, I've spoken very little of the Venar mage Abnaxus - until now he's simply been a cryptic hint provider for Zoe, but Book 4 will explore his background and importance to the plot in far more detail.

Before we begin, in lieu of a more detailed recap here's a very quick situation report: Zoe has managed to shift herself body and soul to the world of Arcadia, a power heretofore inaccessible to her and used only by April Ryan and the "Draic Kin" (the nigh-omniscient Dragons) before now, and was quickly apprehended by the Marcurian Resistance after tracking down their base with the help of the irascible but lovable Crow. In the meantime, former Azadi Apostle Kian Alvane has sneaked on board an Azari cloudship to the prison island Ge'en where the Azadi have been deporting all the fantastical races, or "magicals", from all over Azadi-occupied Arcadia. He's explicitly there to save one magical in particular - the street orphan Bip, who he befriended in an earlier Book and whom has been a helpful companion during a few of his missions for the Resistance. He opted not to take along the vengeful Dolmari warrior Likho, who returned to the Resistance HQ even angrier with Kian than before. Meanwhile, in a house between worlds, a little girl named Saga is slowly beginning to understand her powers...

(Other significant characters: Shepard, wise leader of the Resistance; Enu, a chatty Zhidling rogue working for the Resistance; Jakai, a Resistance scholar and the nephew of Benrime, the kindly innkeeper from the previous games; "General" Blind Bob, a beggar Zoe once befriended who became head of logistics for the Resistance; Na'ane, a healer for the Resistance that betrayed April Ryan who Kian can choose to incriminate; Ulvic, the innkeeper of the "Rooster and Kitten" and Resistance sympathizer; Onor Hilariss, a slimy bigoted demagogue attempting to gain political power in Marcuria; Abnaxus, the Venar mage who sent Zoe a message in her dream, prompting her to return to Arcadia; Lux, the First Dreamer, whose dream created reality as we know it.)

Book 4: Revelations

The Book begins with Crow and Zoe immediately returning to and fixing the contrivance that was keeping Zoe in a containment cell so she wouldn't bump into Kian as he left to go on his mission. I assumed it was like a Time Cop thing where the two protagonists couldn't meet at the same time, because they couldn't both be playable, and they'd implode into a CGI Ron Silver paradox blob. With Crow vouching for her, who the Resistance all know as the close friend of former leader April Ryan, Zoe convinces the rest that she was also friends with Ryan shortly before her passing at the end of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. She introduces herself to the Resistance, including the instantly smitten Enu, before borrowing a key from Blind Bob to Abnaxus's house in the middle of Marcuria. We also get the first big decision of the Book here: Jakai can be observed doing something suspicious in Kian's room. Zoe can continue to observe (what I did) or she can interrupt him, but nothing really comes of the scene.

Upon reaching Abnaxus's abode, we have the first of four puzzles in the game. Onor Hileriss, who sees Abnaxus's quaint fairytale house/tree as an affront to all that is human and rational, has a pair of goons with him to chop it down. The axes bounce off the magical energy protecting the house, but we're kind of on the clock here. What results is an odd puzzle where you essentially control two things: directing Crow to stand on parts of the scenery or attack Onor directly using an arrow prompt, or tell Onor where Crow is hiding so he sends one of his goons there via the same arrow prompt. It's one of those trial and error puzzles that can be mitigated with some forward thinking (for instance, how many locations can be targeted with both arrow prompts?) but it also means not having to mess around with inventory items - you can't even leave the small area around Abnaxus's house, so the developers have clearly taken to heart complaints about the amount of unnecessary walking between hotspots in earlier Books. Something predictable occurs, the group leaves and Zoe sneaks into Abnaxus's house.

Here, though, we meet Brian Westhouse for the first time in Dreamfall Chapters, I believe. Brian was a recurring character in the previous two games; as the only other Stark resident in Arcadia besides April Ryan, he helps April out a few times with the customs and lore he's gathered since entering Arcadia. A university scholar both in Stark and Arcadia, he has spent most of his time in either world studying various mystical secrets and legends. We also know from the prior game that, at some point, Brian was possessed by a malevolent spirit; however, this is player-derived knowledge only, as it occurs after a cutscene lingers on him too long after Zoe has departed. When it comes time for a series of decisions regarding how much you trust Brian - letting him know how you got in (the key), why you're there (to find out where Abnaxus and the Purple Mountains are from the vision) and allowing Brian to stay behind and continue researching after you leave the house - are all contingent on whether the player approaches the game on a meta level than choosing what seems like a sensible choice for Zoe. Zoe only knows Brian as an eccentric but friendly old companion of April Ryan's who she traveled with briefly in Dreamfall: TLJ; she has no specific reason to distrust him beyond her own intuition. Meanwhile, players who have started with Dreamfall Chapters (which seems odd, but OK) won't know who Brian is beyond the game's one opportunity to pretend Zoe's amnesia wiped memories of him too - leading to a reintroduction - and so that player won't know about Brian's ominous little companion. Being vague with your responses and kicking him out of the house once your business is done seems unnecessarily dickish, though it has been made clear to the player in the past that Brian Westhouse is a very dangerous individual who shouldn't be trusted or told anything vital whatsoever. I've never seen a decision that hinges so much on "outside knowledge" in a game like this, as most if not all rely on the player's ignorance of what will happen as a consequence of their choice, which is why there's often an even number of players who chose either of the divergent paths.

Having gleaned the location of the Purple Mountains from Abnaxus's study, Zoe realizes that she'll also need a "soul-stone" McGuffin to restore Lux's health. To do this, she goes to the last known owner: the warlock Roper Knacks, who was last seen in Dreamfall: TLJ as a "reformed" wizard in Marcuria's square hocking tell-all memoirs and now putting on fingerpuppet plays of his run-in with the hated April Ryan, who at this time in general Marcurian society has been posthumously branded as a villain that once led the Resistance until the heroic Azadi cut her down. Knacks isn't all that reformed, we learn from some of the least convincing sotto voce comments he makes about April, but is just laying low as a showman for reasons that become slightly more evident later. For now, he gives Zoe the knowledge that the soul-stone he once had now belongs to a creature known only as "Yaga", who resides in Riverwood forest. He promises to tell Zoe more after the show, but is dragged away by Vamon during the play as Onor Hileriss (who might as well be called Boo Hiss and the villain of a morally black-and-white children's performance himself) insists that the play is "teaching children about magic".

After this, Zoe and Crow manage to find one of the elgwan beasts to head out of the city, first to Riverwood for Yaga's soul-stone and onwards to the Purple Mountains where Abnaxus and Lux are to be found. The game has some fun here, suggesting a whole mess of misadventures and additional illogical puzzle solutions occurred off-screen to acquire the beast and leave the city in one piece. The game only just previously had Zoe mention in her head that she'll "never ride one of those things" after observing a picture of an elgwan, so the game's being as cute as an 80s sitcom right now. What follows next is a blast from the past for fans of the original game: Zoe heads to the same part of Riverwood forest that April did, meeting the mole-person Ben-Bandu along the way and visiting the abode of the Gribbler witch that April defeated. The Yaga sequence is genuinely great: Upon visiting the Gribbler's old house in a spooky part of the forest where the dreamworld and reality are clashing, the house suddenly rears up to resemble an enormous serpentine head. The player can then call upon Zoe's handful of dream powers in this space between worlds - stopping time, reading minds and telekinesis, all gained at the start of Book 1 but dormant until now - to get into the void at the center of the Yaga's head. It's in here we meet the entity collectively known as Baba Yaga, or the Nox; a primeval entity of unimaginable power that acts as the universal nightmare to Lux's universal dream - the game's emphasis on balance puts her as a necessary evil that has existed in the darkness for far longer than there has been a reality to fill said void. Baba Yaga is depicted as three female entities - a child, a maiden and a crone, a familiar arrangement in female neo-paganistic deities - who decide to help Zoe, but only after Zoe has fed them some of her negative memories. This is where the game has some fun with the bad decisions the player may have made as Zoe, either wittingly or inadvertently. For instance, the only "bad" memory I had on hand to feed the trio was the memory of running away from Nela, Zoe's Communist food-trolley vendor friend, instead of towards her as she approached the EYE building to suicide bomb it. I'm sure other the other bad decisions you could make as Zoe would've appeared here as alternate options, though I'm curious if the game would've let me continue without any bad decisions to feed to the Yaga.

The Yaga relents to giving up the soul-stone (her only food source), despite several threats of eating Zoe and telling her that she is the one being that would survive if Lux were to suddenly stop dreaming and thus doesn't really give a shit. Turns out the Yaga only has power when there are people around to fear and respect her, and if not her then the darkness and evil in general. Zoe leaves with the soul-stone and meets the Mole as she is escaping from Marcuria; the Mole offers Zoe her fast steed to reach the Purple Mountains and some better directions than we got from Abnaxus's library, amazed that she was able to meet the Yaga and walk away relatively whole. The two Bandu then leave the area and also presumably the game, opting to move East to look for other Bandu survivors. Zoe then travels to the Purple Mountains - there's another "wow, that was some crazy stuff that just happened" joke after Zoe and Crow reach the Oular village where Abnaxus and Lux are waiting - and a one-sided conversation happens between Zoe and Lux in the dream world that convinces Zoe of her destiny. Lux vanishes from his/her place on the Oular altar and Zoe shifts back through to Stark after saying goodbye to Crow for the last time. Naturally, this last hour or so didn't have much in the way of puzzles whatsoever, but the game needs to get through a lot of plot that it's built up over the last few Books (and prior games) so I can forgive a larger focus on the narrative for now, especially when it's this elaborate.

At some point during all this, we also have our brief time with Kian Alvane for this Book. Last seen boarding a cloudship to the prison island of Ge'en, the first puzzle is finding a way up the cliffs around the prison camp, and then onto the citadel watchtower and then finally into the Administrator's office for some answers and Bip's location. What's really fun here, and I'm sure the game is hoping more than a few people pick up on it without spelling it out to them, is that the island is littered with effigies to an unnamed "Necromancer King" who ruled the island a millennium ago. One of these effigies is a 100ft tall statue on the beach. Every effigy is also lacking its head; however, you can poke around the beach to quickly find the head of the statue, and it's a spitting image of Roper Klacks himself. I really like that they took this character - a minor villain in the first game, a joke cameo in the second, and a slightly sinister presence in the Zoe cutscenes just previously - and brought him back to create even more mysteries surrounding him. All we know at this point is that before he was defeated by April Ryan, Roper Klacks was beholden to the Yaga for his power, like every evil, weak-willed magical being that the Yaga could corrupt, but there's clearly no telling just how old or powerful Klacks truly is.

When Kian finally meets the Administrator after what I'll graciously called the most gameplay-intensive sequence in this Book (though fortunately one without any stealth), she's revealed to be a mad scientist that has been creating a virus to wipe out every magical person, creature, insect and plant while leaving humans alive. She does this at the behest of the "Prophet" - a mysterious character who has been mentioned a few times as having the ears of the Azadi council leaders - and her newest victim that she's hacking away at when Kian finds her is none other than Bip. The game leaves Bip's fate fairly ambiguous here; Kian acts like he could still be saved, though the Administrator (who goes unnamed for this whole sequence) is splashed in blood. General Rami happens to walk in at that point, and Kian has to think fast to dispatch the gun-toting Administrator in time before he or his mentor is fatally shot. We then leave Kian trying to explain the amount of mass slaughter and amoral experimentation happening at Ge'en to his former superior officer as his part of Book 4 ends.

Two other things occur during this Book, neither of which is seen by the major characters but the players are given the scoop for the sake of drama. The first is the attack on the Resistance HQ, which claims the lives of Likho (I imagine he might've survived if I'd taken him with Kian, but who needs grumpyguts around cramping my style?), Blind Bob and Jakai - who turns out to have been the mole all along, and gets murdered by Vamon for his trouble. Enu survives, but only because I spared Na'ane, and Shepard is mysteriously fine too. It seems as if the entire rest of the Resistance was wiped out in this attack, which begins and ends sorta quickly and anticlimactically. The other thing that occurs is the third Intermission: we once again visit a now-teenaged Saga and help her escape the inter-dimensional house she has spent her life in, breaking down wards that block her power with memories in another annoying mini-game that every Intermission has had so far, and seeing her depart in a flash of light as she becomes the (other) Girl Who Walked Between Worlds. It also becomes more evident before this final Intermission that Saga has something to do with both the White Dragon and April Ryan, possibly being a reincarnation of the two mixed together. I guess that'll be explained in the final Book... Hell, I'm sure a lot of things will be.

Overall, Book 4 suffers a little from having to fast-forward its plot to the point where Book 5 can wrap everything up, dropping most of the plot-interrupting adventure game puzzles in the process (but cheekily alluding to them all the same), but the part I was dreading most - that this Book more than any other would end on an anxiety-inducing cliffhanger only to be resolved months later - didn't come to pass. Kian's getting through to the honorable Rami and has enough evidence to bring Arcadia's antagonists Sister Sahya and Vamon down, Zoe's now resolute in her purpose... though the player has yet to find out what her role is, specifically, besides that it probably involves going back to Stark, and Saga has now departed her home and can explore the nexus of worlds at her leisure. I've yet to figure out how time works for Saga - both April and the White Dragon died less than a year ago in the game's timeline, at the end of Dreamfall: TLJ, so either her location in a realm between realms allowed the game to fast-forward through her formative years, or she grows very quickly as a Dragon Kin, or her connection to those two isn't quite what I thought it was. For now though, it seems we have some mysteries afoot.

Should I start predicting things for the final Book? OK, let's have at it (possible spoilers for Book 5):

• There's two "nemeses" to confront, one for each world, that are working together to perpetuate the dream-machine plot to destroy reality. It's possibly a single "Undreaming" being possessing the two of them - a darkness that is described as being one of total negation, rather than Yaga's darkness which is there for balance. For Arcadia, it seems fairly obvious that this person is the Azadi's mysterious Prophet, who I imagine is also Brian Westhouse. The trickier side of the coin is the Stark equivalent: There's the CEO of WATICorp as an obvious culprit, as she was the creator and propagator of the dream-machines, but we haven't heard anything from her since Dreamfall: TLJ. It's also possible that the culprit is Zoe's duplicitous mother, Dr. Helena Chang, who was the one who put Zoe in a coma and is still working for WATICorp in some capacity. That makes more sense from a dramatic standpoint, given that Dreamfall Chapters has at least brought her up a few times in passing to explain Zoe's delicate mental state and feelings of abandonment back in Book 1. I guess we also can't overlook the "imposter" Reza that Coma Zoe could tell was a fake, though I still don't know where the game is going with that.
• I also suspect that General Rami and the visiting member of the Six (the Azadi's leadership, comprised of six young girls who rule everything in the Empire) will end up dead once Sahya and Vamon's plot has been revealed, and Kian's motivation to avenge them will overwhelm his otherwise compassionate nature. Kian, as the game has intimated a few times, is a near-mythically skillful warrior that rose to the Apostle position after killing hundreds of enemies for the Azadi Empire. To Dreamfall Chapters's credit and its dedication to being a fully narrative-driven adventure game rather than one that shoehorns in action sequences like those in Dreamfall: TLJ, the game so rarely relies on this aspect of his character, instead choosing to explore his status as a conflicted human being who is forced to fight against his own people because his sense of honor and morality cannot condone what they are doing. Still, it's clear he could kick some ass if need be, as evinced by him snatching an arrow out of the air early on in Dreamfall Chapters. Who does that?
• My only prediction for Saga is that she takes on the mantle of the new White Dragon at some point and eventually meets the rest of the group. Maybe they'll allude to her being a reincarnation of April Ryan, which would make sense of her childhood sketches of April's adventures. Given some cryptic lines from Abnaxus about Crow's role to come, I suspect Crow will appear as Saga's new sidekick in Book 5 and stay with her from then on. The game might also decide to kill off more of the game's secondary characters on the final stretch, because why not? There's a lot of loose ends in both worlds to tie up: The role of the giant Azadi computing machine the Prophet is building throughout Marcuria; the dream machines; the connection between the aforementioned two; the modified Dolmari Plague virus; minor Stark villains like Mr. London, the fascistic EYE and the crooked politicians of Propast; the importance of Hanna's role as a shifter (or Anna's as a double-agent come to think of it, though we got a fairly decent idea what the deal was with her at the end of Book 3) and many others. Book 5 has a huge task ahead of it, though I can't imagine it'll get around to everything.

Anyway, that's my word salad of a recap/review for Book 4 of Dreamfall Chapters. I hope to have the final part up tomorrow or Thursday, after which I can put these characters and worlds in the vault for who knows how long. Tornquist's story about two worlds and the balance between them has taken quite some time to tell, but I'm happy he got the opportunity to end that journey on his terms. Or maybe even extend it further...?