August 3, 2006 - In the great spirit of “the sky is falling, the sky is falling”, many reviewers, myself included, have previously made statements to the fact that it may seem the adventure game is a dying breed. Oddly, these statements came after a year of playing and reviewing such titles as Still Life, Syberia 2, Myst 4 and Indigo Prophecy. It seems we may all have been a little presumptuous with our doom and gloom. The simple fact of the matter is that adventure games are simply maturing, evolving and moving away from the excepted puzzle oriented fare of Maniac Mansion and Leisure Suit Larry and focusing more on intelligent stories and detailed, believable characters. The game that is arguably the most responsible for this change in focus is Funcom’s own The Longest Journey. And while it may have seemed to many that we would never see a sequel to that masterpiece, six years have passed and Funcom/Aspyr have delivered a sequel that is not only an amazing game in its own right, but a worthy sequel to such a landmark pedigree.

The story of Dreamfall takes place ten years after the events of The Longest Journey. For those who have never had the pleasure of playing it, the important elements of its back-story are relayed in the game’s manual and while they do help relay to certain events and characters, knowledge of the first game is not necessary to play or enjoy Dreamfall. While The Longest Journey focused on a young girl named April Ryan who could shift between parallel worlds, this adventure is more focused on Zoe Castillo, a young girl living in Casablanca with her father. A perfect representative of most young people nowadays, Zoe is sorely in search of purpose and direction in her life. Having dropped out of school and ended a long relationship with her boyfriend, she sleeps in late, watches programs, throws parties and procrastinates about everything (work, exercise, etc). Along the way, Dreamfall does visit (and allow you to control) April and various other characters, but Zoe is the main protagonist.

Dreamfall, for those unfamiliar with the series, is an adventure game heavily built on characterization, brilliant storytelling and far-flung concepts ranging from pure sci-fi to parallel universes. At heart, it is a science-fiction game set hundreds of years into the future where even the smallest detail seems both familiar and strangely alien. The city of Casablanca itself is a mishmash of early 20th century European/Spanish architecture with a blend of futuristic skyscrapers and artifacts. Walking around in the game is always a pleasure because it allows you to take in a world carefully crafted and thought out which is at once reminiscent and at the same time otherworldly. As with its characters, dialog and story-line, the artistic direction of Dreamfall is a high point and just one of many reason to play this game.

For the most part, you will be controlling Zoe, from a third person perspective, as she explores familiar and unfamiliar locales. In any environment, you’ll be given options to interact or view most objects around you. A cursor box always shows you where Zoe’s focus is and using the somewhat bulky focus-field controls, you can survey an entire room easily looking for all the objects which can be viewed, picked up or used. Focusing on characters will initiate conversations or monologs about the person. During conversations you’ll generally be given topics to talk about and general dispositions of answers. These choices are really just there so those with ADD will stay tuned since the conversations generally go on for a bit. This is not a bad thing however, since the dialog is honest, believable and captivating.

The other gameplay mechanics in the game involve managing and exploring your inventory (and combining/using items to solve puzzles - nothing too complicated), sneaking around and also fighting, which fits into the story, but isn’t handled very well at all. Although there isn’t much of it and it’s relatively easy, the fighting in the game, which mostly consists of moving your character about and performing light/heavy attacks while blocking, is the only downside to an otherwise perfect game.