Dreamfall Chapters is the third release in a series that began in 1999 with the critically acclaimed PC-based point-and-click adventure The Longest Journey developed by Norway’s Funcom. The game’s highly anticipated 2006 follow-up, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, stumbled a bit in execution and as a result, development for the third title, Dreamfall Chapters, found itself in years of financial limbo.
A successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign was completed in 2014, allowing the developers to deliver Dreamfall Chapters to supports and fans on Windows, OS X, and Linux via five episodic releases (or “books” per the developer) spaced out from 2014 to 2016. A full year later, console gamers are finally getting their chance to play all five of Dreamfall Chapters episodes in one comprehensive “Final Cut” package.
The story follows the franchise’s extremely convoluted mythology which involves a multiverse of simultaneously existing worlds spanning science, magic, reality and dreams. Actions in one world may have repercussions in another. Having not played any of the previous releases, I was immediately lost to the complicated storyline, but the game does a fairly good job of backstory explanation.
It all begins with the heroine Zoe who is currently taking up residence in the dream world, Storytime, while her mortal body on Earth, or Stark as it is called in the distant future, is imprisoned in a forcibly induced coma. Zoe spends her days in Storytime freeing other dreamers from their nightmares, which she sees as silhouetted scenes popping up along her path. Eventually Zoe is asked to return to her earthly body to take down WatiCorp the corporation behind the highly addictive Dreammachines that are enslaving Stark’s population.
Gameplay is a hybrid adventure combining third-person action and point-and-click exploration. Interactions tend to be puzzle-like in nature, tasking the gamer with performing a specific series of logical tasks in order to solve them correctly.
For instance, the first challenge of the game takes place in the dream world (Storytime), Zoe is tasked with helping a young girl who is having a nightmare about a monster in her closet. Zoe approaches the closet and finds that the monster can be destroyed with light. However, the monster moves away too quickly to be affected by her only source of light, a flashlight. Zoe has the ability to slow down time in the dream world and that, coupled with her flashlight, successfully dispatches the closet kraken.
As Zoe (and later, Kian) traverse the various worlds of Storytime, Europolis and Arcadia, gamers will experience a mixed bag of presentation quality. Each world appears to be well laid-out and appropriate, but they tend to lack the amount of awe-inspiring detail that we have come to expect from this generation of consoles. The dull colors and sparse environments look more unintentionally dated than they do intentionally dystopian.
And then there’s the dialogue. It doesn’t take long to realize that there are some distinct differences in the game’s native Norwegian tongue and our own English – Dreamfall Chapters’ dialog comes across a embarrassingly corny. I assume this is a “lost-in-translation” issue, but when a character says “He used my sword to run himself through. It’s his blood on my hands” all I can think of is “all you base are belong to us.” I do give kudos to the developer for including a strong, gay protagonist, but making sure the character doesn’t speak like Yoda probably should have been a priority.
Obviously, Dreamfall Chapters’ multiverse gameplay has a distinct resemblance to the Assassins Creed series, although it would be safe to argue that 2006’s Dreamfall and 1999’s The Longest Journey came along a few years before Ubisoft’s epic franchise. Sadly, whereas Assassins Creed delivers a very fluid and intuitive gameplay, Dreamfall Chapters’ movement and interactions are wonky and stiff. The game was originally developed to be played with a keyboard and a mouse, but with three years’ additional time for the consoles, one would have thought the developers would have done a better job porting the controls.
Fans of The Longest Journey and Dreamfall are sure to enjoy Dreamfall Chapters’ continuation of the series. It certainly has its issues – especially in terms of presentation and mechanics, but there is some truly interesting gameplay to be had in Chapters’ unique multiverse.
