The Longest Journey

I stared and stared and stared at that electrical spark on the subway rail. It made no sense to me. Obviously there was something significant about it, something I needed to do with it. After all, the Eye made that clear. It was making fun of me, the Eye. I'd direct my attention toward the spark and it would appear again, letting me know that, hey, this was important and I'd better figure out what to do with it.

There was a key hidden in the spark. The Eye told me I should care about it.

I emptied my pockets. Nothing made immediate sense, candy wrapper, old photo of friends, a fake leaf for god's sake. (Why am I carrying a fake leaf?) Out of desperation I tried everything I had in my pockets. None of it worked by itself. Time to try the combo trick, the one where I combine everything in my pockets with everything else in my pockets to see what happens.  Eventually, I figured out that I could tie a clothesline that I had been carrying around to a clamp, lower the clamp toward the spark, and pick up the key.

Thus began my Journey of the Longest variety.  Only half an hour into the first chapter and already I was pixel hunting and turning to the age old strategy of trying random and ridiculous actions.  Not a great sign.  The Longest Journey is a game that I've seen mentioned on many "overlooked classics" lists.  I'd wanted to play it when it was first released but didn't have the cash, so I waited.  I waited just long enough until I couldn't find a boxed copy anywhere to save my life.  So when I saw it on sale last Christmas at GOG, I decided that the $3 would be worth it.

I've now finished the game and I agree that the setting of the story, one in which a dystopian future world we might expect on earth has long been separated from a parallel dimension where magic is the rule of the day, is a great backdrop for the adventure at hand.  While the world is not colored with the same minute strokes that, say, Tolkien attempted, it is still a canvas on which the details have obviously been thoroughly planned.  Without a doubt, there were probably pages of history and character backstory that didn't need to be in the game.  That effort did not go unnoticed during my play sessions.

However, the one fatal flaw that I believe mars the greatness of the setting, is the gameplay itself.  It suffers from the mere fact that it was one of the last breaths of a dying genre.  The LucasArts and Sierra adventures had also mined these same tunnels of most of their gems.  The Longest Journey was simply a great story told a decade too soon.  Pixel hunting and combining (in some cases) some extremely odd inventory items to cause the story to progress were two of the major nails in adventure games' coffin and The Longest Journey didn't skimp in either department.  By contrast, the Penumbra series made only five or six years later was a unique revitalization, a fantastic mash-up of first-person perspective exploring, puzzle solving, and some admittedly bungled combat.  If I found a dusty old lamp with a genie in it, I think one of my wishes would be that developers would pick up on the techniques that were begun in Penumbra and refine them, implement them and adapt them into more modern adventure titles, one where the puzzles actually involve combining things that make sense.

Another complaint, although much smaller, is that there are so many lines of dialogue to wade through, each and every one of which is spoken at varying levels of quality by voice actors, that the game quickly becomes and act of trying to find the one bit of information you need hidden way inside all the story bits that are only interesting window dressing.  I found myself playing with my index finger hovering over the ESC key, because I could read the text faster than it was being spoken.  I would get to the end of the line while the character was still mumbling half way back before I would *ESC*.  The game is already long enough and it just seemed like all the spoken dialogue (especially by some egregiously slow-speaking characters) forced the game into overtime, although it probably made a great marketing bullet point on the back of the box, "200 Hours of Gameplay!".   To add to the "extended gameplay" dynamic, sometimes, you have to wade through all of the dialogue options before you get to the stuff you need.  That's not choice or interactivity.  That's just annoying.

Truth be told, I enjoyed The Longest Journey not for the game but for the fantastic effort expended to create a truly believable fictional fantasy world.  The world has some unique qualities that propel it beyond many of the adventure games of that era.  It's only major flaw is the slice of time it occupies in the history of video gaming which, last I checked, is not really its fault.