Mento's May Mastery '16: Day Nineteen: Dreamfall Chapters
By Mento 0 Comments
Dreamfall Chapters
As promised, today's update on Red Thread Games's Dreamfall Chapters will largely be comprised of very spoilery episode recaps and how I've tackled the big decisions so far.
Before then, though, I'd like to expand on the various reasons why I continue to be dissatisfied with the game. To continue yesterday's point about how any adventure game made in the episodic format seems obligated to throw in momentous decisions of which you cannot possibly predict the result, an ubiquitous aspect I already don't much care for in modern adventure games, Dreamfall Chapters adds its own curious and not necessarily beneficial variations to this format. The first, and the one that perhaps almost defeats the purpose of this feature, is that the player can actually see how the player base has voted before they've made the choice themselves. It may make a tough decision easier to handle if you know which way the vox populi took it, but it could also lend credence to the idea that one choice might lead to something catastrophic, and the ratio of decisions could be weighted by those on a subsequent playthrough who already know what will happen if a certain course of action is chosen. The other thing is that the game almost explicitly tells you at the end of the chapter what may result as a consequence of your choices - whether it regards your relationship to another character, to the fate of someone else, to possibly even the way the game will eventually conclude. With these tweaks it almost feels like the "big decision" format was begrudgingly forced upon the developers and they've tried to find ways to make it as painless as possible for all the series fans who are now constantly stressed that they've made the wrong choice for that character or cancelled a potentially exciting side-story or killed off a beloved ancillary character. This is played up in game too: Kian and Zoe are always constantly questioning the decisions they made, as they both continue to adjust to their new lives and the tragedies that seems to follow them both.
There's also the second issue I have with the game, and this is something they opted to carry over from Dreamfall. No, it's not any forced stealth sections - there's a couple of minor puzzles that required eluding detection, but it's scarcely as bad as Dreamfall, and I actually got a jokey "I Thought There Wouldn't Be Stealth!" achievement for messing one of them up too often - it's the fact that each chapter of the game involved a giant confusing hub to run around in with only a handful of hotspots scattered across them that were required to solve the puzzles. These towns were built for a sense of verisimilitude; instead of warping from one story-significant area of the town to the other like in most graphic adventure games, you have to manually jog over there, and there's naught but window dressing to see on the way. When there's only three or four hotspots you need to be concerned about, but you're spending several minutes running between them each visit, it doesn't feel like a conducive use of one's time. That Book 2 had one of these immediately followed by an even bigger one, in two completely distinct but equally labyrinthine urban settings, it really padded the game out beyond the handful of puzzles and cutscenes that comprised the game's "meat". The game feels unnecessarily drawn out because of sequences like these, but it's possible future chapters won't have this issue - whether that's because I'm now used to running around these places and won't get lost quite so easily (there are maps everywhere, but the game did not let you take one with you for the longest time) or because the game has moved onto new locations, I'll never say. Well, not yet.
Now that I've completed the first two Books, I'm still invested enough in the game's story and that of the overall series to keep going, but it's fair to say that this game has problems. I'll elaborate some more tomorrow, where I hope to complete Book 3 and hopefully Book 4 before moving onto the next game on the May Mastery list. For now, though, we enter spoiler town for Book 1 and Book 2 of Dreamfall Chapters:
Book 1: Reborn
Book 2: Rebels
Instead, let's wrap this up for now and I'll cover more of the game tomorrow. That is, if I don't get burned out from running around cities for hours.