Post by Sinistrous on Apr 17, 2008 22:13:21 GMT -5
The Longest Journey is an adventure game from Norwegian developer Funcom (the company would be better known today as the guys who are developing the MMO, Age of Conan) and I believe it was released around 1997.
You play the character, April Ryan, an art student living in the world of Stark. The plot itself is a bit strange and deals with the thinning of the line between the world of Stark, a land of science and technology, and Arcadia, a land of magic and fantasy; overall an imaginative dwelling on the central theme of order vs. chaos. Your role in the story is to restore the balance between the two worlds, lest chaos overtake both. It's a pretty adult-oriented story too; you'll discover this very quickly after exercising some of the dialog options with your landlady at the beginning of the game.
The highest praises that I can give to this game though is to the world that they created. While the world of Stark mostly resembles a futuristic version of Earth with hovercars, holograms and whatnot (a standard yet still occasionally clever vision), the world of Arcadia is rich and filled with a variety of environments and races, my favorite of these races being the Venar, a species that seems to exist on a plane outside of time itself, who send an ambassador named Abnaxus to meet with April in the Arcadian city of Marcuria.
The game itself is, much like Grim Fandango, a throwback to classic LucasArts adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max: Hit the Road and The Secret of Monkey Island. You have the same basic commands of move, look, operate, and talk along with the use of an inventory. Most of the gameplay involves combining/using collected items, dealing with and getting information from NPCs and solving puzzles. While dealing with NPCs is a rather simple tasks (the game doesn't let you rock the boat much, you're essentially railroaded without many choices the entire time - not a complaint, just a note) and most of the item usage and puzzle solving is relatively logical, others are a bit too unintuitive and completely rely on the player throwing random items all over the screen - one of the early examples having to do with disguising the shadow of a bunch of trash like a recently broom-thrashed private investigator who was choking on radioactive gum at the time and placing a cymbal-banging monkey toy behind it that repeats "DO THE MONKEY" to scare a movie theater employee into dancing around so you can sneak in the back to meet a guy named Cortez. Compared to some of the later puzzles, this is pretty intuitive.
I'll admit, it's pretty damn funny and one of the most memorable scenes in the game but I was seriously this close to looking up a guide for it on GameFAQs.
There are some technical issues too: I experienced a few crashes and lost some save games (note: make several as you go along - I ended up in the upper twenties myself) and sometimes your journal saves the wrong conversations instead of the ones you might need (happened to me once during my dealing with the aforementioned P.I.). The interface is also a bit sloppy, but still serviceable.
Overall, if you like the old LucasArts adventure games yet want something a bit more serious and have a computer that isn't running Windows 3.1, this might be worth looking into. Some of the artwork is quite breathtaking, the music is varied and carefully paced, and it's all accompanied with some excellent voice acting and dialog. The game is not perfect, it has its fair share of flaws, but I still like it myself. It's certainly not up to the standards of Grim Fandango, but it still manages itself well and offers an enormous scope that, in and of itself, makes the game worth your time.
Overall Rating: 7.5/10
You play the character, April Ryan, an art student living in the world of Stark. The plot itself is a bit strange and deals with the thinning of the line between the world of Stark, a land of science and technology, and Arcadia, a land of magic and fantasy; overall an imaginative dwelling on the central theme of order vs. chaos. Your role in the story is to restore the balance between the two worlds, lest chaos overtake both. It's a pretty adult-oriented story too; you'll discover this very quickly after exercising some of the dialog options with your landlady at the beginning of the game.
The highest praises that I can give to this game though is to the world that they created. While the world of Stark mostly resembles a futuristic version of Earth with hovercars, holograms and whatnot (a standard yet still occasionally clever vision), the world of Arcadia is rich and filled with a variety of environments and races, my favorite of these races being the Venar, a species that seems to exist on a plane outside of time itself, who send an ambassador named Abnaxus to meet with April in the Arcadian city of Marcuria.
The game itself is, much like Grim Fandango, a throwback to classic LucasArts adventure games like Maniac Mansion, Sam & Max: Hit the Road and The Secret of Monkey Island. You have the same basic commands of move, look, operate, and talk along with the use of an inventory. Most of the gameplay involves combining/using collected items, dealing with and getting information from NPCs and solving puzzles. While dealing with NPCs is a rather simple tasks (the game doesn't let you rock the boat much, you're essentially railroaded without many choices the entire time - not a complaint, just a note) and most of the item usage and puzzle solving is relatively logical, others are a bit too unintuitive and completely rely on the player throwing random items all over the screen - one of the early examples having to do with disguising the shadow of a bunch of trash like a recently broom-thrashed private investigator who was choking on radioactive gum at the time and placing a cymbal-banging monkey toy behind it that repeats "DO THE MONKEY" to scare a movie theater employee into dancing around so you can sneak in the back to meet a guy named Cortez. Compared to some of the later puzzles, this is pretty intuitive.
I'll admit, it's pretty damn funny and one of the most memorable scenes in the game but I was seriously this close to looking up a guide for it on GameFAQs.
There are some technical issues too: I experienced a few crashes and lost some save games (note: make several as you go along - I ended up in the upper twenties myself) and sometimes your journal saves the wrong conversations instead of the ones you might need (happened to me once during my dealing with the aforementioned P.I.). The interface is also a bit sloppy, but still serviceable.
Overall, if you like the old LucasArts adventure games yet want something a bit more serious and have a computer that isn't running Windows 3.1, this might be worth looking into. Some of the artwork is quite breathtaking, the music is varied and carefully paced, and it's all accompanied with some excellent voice acting and dialog. The game is not perfect, it has its fair share of flaws, but I still like it myself. It's certainly not up to the standards of Grim Fandango, but it still manages itself well and offers an enormous scope that, in and of itself, makes the game worth your time.
Overall Rating: 7.5/10
