Dreamfall Impressions and More

Another PC games post. Only those interested need inquire within.

I finished Dreamfall, the sequel to the fantastic adventure game, The Longest Journey (hereafter TLJ), about three hours ago. And now, I’m a bit upset. I’ll try to explain why with as few spoilers as possible.

Let me begin at the ending. As with movies, endings are a make-or-break moment for single-player, plot-driven games, at least for me. Here, Dreamfall fails because it doesn’t really end. Almost all the subplots are left unresolved, leaving the player completely unsatisfied and craving closure. Now, with Half-Life 2, I felt like I had done and seen enough during the game’s journey that the open-ended finale didn’t bother me. Dreamfall, on the other hand, isn’t much of a game; seeing how the game’s epic tale resolves itself was the whole purpose for “playing”.

I say “playing” because Dreamfall is essentially nothing more than a slightly interactive movie. Your actions don’t affect the plot in more than superficial ways, and most of the gameplay consists of moving the protagonist (who can be one of three different characters, a nice twist that adds some needed variety) from one plot hook to the next. The puzzles are child’s play; I only consulted a walkthrough once for a puzzle that involved crafting a four musical notes melody composed of three different notes (i.e. 3^4 = 81 possibilities) simply because I didn’t want to try all the possibilities, and the game gave no hint as to which melody was the correct one. Also, a couple of the puzzles, such as the lockpicking ones, are reused frequently. Furthermore, there are very few items in the game world that can go into your character’s inventory, making everything more straightforward than it should be. Some of your items can be combined together to create a more useful item, but I think that option was only used a literal handful of times throughout the whole game.

Dialogue is the highlight of this game. The characters’ lines are expertly constructed and nuanced, as are their deliveries. I found myself laughing outloud throughout several of the cinematics. Many of TLJ’s memorable characters return, although it has been some time since I played TLJ, so I had to refresh my memory after beating Dreamfall about what some of these characters had done in the former game. Additionally, new characters are added to the cast, and I was generally satisfied with them, largely due to their superb voice acting.

Ultimately, everything else in Dreamfall feels unfinished. The world is populated with generic NPCs (non-player characters) that say equally generic lines (reminiscent of the Knights of the Old Republic, abbreviated as KOTOR, games) and don’t even have lip-moving animations. Thus, a dead giveaway about whether a character was important or not was whether its lips moved when delivering a line. Also similar to KOTOR, every character has a somewhat limited number of animations, leading to the same gestures being repeated over and over again from one cinematic to the next (not as bad as KOTOR but still painfully noticeable). Plus, the protagonist that you control generally has only one line of dialogue for a particular type of unusable objects. For example, for inoperable doors, your character might say, “This door is locked”, and will repeat that line for every inoperable door. All of this means that the game can get tiresomely repetitive quickly. I kept pushing on because I assumed a spectacular denouement would reward me at the end for all this drudgery; I was sorely mistaken (see above).

One of the most appealing aspects of TLJ was its artistic direction. Its graphics engine may not have been top-of-the-line, but its backgrounds were beautifully rendered, and the FMVs were breathtaking. In Dreamfall, the graphics engine is fully 3D and competitive with other games (the characters’ faces are especially good), but I didn’t see anything particularly jaw-dropping. Plus, the engine has some glaring clipping problems, unacceptable by today’s standards.

I feel like, with another year of development, this game could have lived up to the pedigree of its predecessor. With that time, the plot could have been fully fleshed out instead of left at a cliffhanger conclusion (albeit that was possibly an intentional move to allow for a further sequel), and the gameplay could have been enhanced. If it hadn’t been for the engaging and lively dialogue, this game would have been a complete bore. However, I still eagerly await the next installment in the TLJ franchise, assuming this one sold well enough to justify a third and, likely, final chapter. I need closure!

If I hadn’t screwed up with its shipping address, I would have Oblivion here to console me, but I’m afraid that’s at Lehigh, waiting for one of my roommates to pick it up and send it to me. Until then, I continue to wait for my Salisbury friends to return home and to pass the time with Internet video watching (side note – Ergo Proxy is an excellent and modern anime series). And next week, I look forward to the release of Heroes of Might and Magic V (my impressions of the demo here). What a tough life.

Addendum - For a more comprehensive review, I recommend IGN's review. Its author shares my views but goes into more detail than I did, including Dreamfall's disappointing fighting and stealth systems and its excellent use of sound, especially its soundtrack.