Reviewed: January 27, 2001
Reviewed by: Mark Smith
Publisher
Funcom
Developer
Funcom
Released: November 17, 2000
Genre: Adventure
Players: 1
ESRB: Mature
6
9
8
7
7.2
System Requirements
Recommended System
Adventure has always been my favorite gaming genre. I can remember back in the early 80's long before I could ever afford my own computer, I would hang out at the local Radio Shack and play Zork: The Great Underground Empire on the TRS-80 they had setup in the store. Infocom text adventures would carry me through until 1985 when I played my first graphical adventure; Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. I was hooked, and immediately became addicted to every adventure game that Sierra Online released.
For the past several years we have been lacking good games in the adventure genre. Lucasarts releases the occasional adventure game but they never seem to be as good as their older games such as Sam-n-Max Hit the Road, the Monkey Island series, or even Full Throttle. Sierra hasn't released a good adventure game in years and now that company is defunct, so we can't expect anything new from them. I was very excited when I heard early reports about a new import title called The Longest Journey, which was getting rave reviews and being compared to many of the adventure games I had grown up with. When I was offered the chance to review this title I jumped at it.
Normally I have the privilege of playing a game and doing a review before I can become influenced by other reviews and public opinions in the newsgroups. Unfortunately, with this title I had read lots of news posts and read several reviews about how "great" this game was before I ever got my hands on it. I feared I would be biased towards this game, but as you are about to read nothing could be further from the truth.
The Longest Journey comes on four packed CD's and if you opt for the complete installation you will be committing your hard drive to a 2gb install comprised of 9,715 files in 495 directories. Apparently FUNCOM, the designers, never heard of PAK files so you are immediately treated to one of the longest install procedures in gaming history. The manual claims your install could take up to 30 minutes. On my P3-700 with 40x CDROM and a very fast hard drive the installation took 48 minutes. The only other install that even comes close to this is the 1985 Star Trek: Judgment Rites game which took about 60min but only because it shipped on about 18 floppies.
Once the game was installed my first quest was for drivers to get it to run properly. My first attempt to play had the screen split in two with half on each edge of the monitor in some weird wrap-around mode. Installing DirectX 8 fixed this immediately, so be warned that if you aren't running DX8 and plan to play TLJ then you may as well start downloading it now. There are also terrible sound problems, which you may or may not be able to fix. Even with the latest sound card (SB Live X-Gamer) and drivers I was getting terrible stuttering with the dialog. This is mainly due to those 9,000 files, which consist of bits of dialog that must be randomly seeked and loaded from your hard drive. A fast and defragged drive will help a little, but you may end up having to play around with the sound tweaks in the advanced settings. Even then it may never work with your system.
The Longest Journey takes place in the 23rd century and is a story about April Ryan, an 18yr old girl who has left her abusive father and moved to the "city" to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. We meet up with her after she has been in town for only a short while. She has a few friends, an annoying boss, a lesbian landlord, and a few strange characters that interject themselves into her daily life.
The game begins with a dream sequence that reveals only the tip of the paranormal iceberg you will uncover if you manage to complete the entire adventure. The game takes place over 13 chapters that span several days. During the first few days you will go about your normal routine such as going to school, working at the coffee house, visiting an art gallery, and a movie theater. Soon afterward you will be thrust into a parallel world and learn unsettling secrets that uncover your ultimate destiny.
Good adventure games have several things in common; a good story, interesting characters, and challenging (but logical) puzzles. If the game fails to capture any of these criteria then it has a hard time becoming a success. The Longest Journey seems to prove this theory wrong however. It falls short on several of these yet for some reason continues to be heralded by reviewers and fans alike as "one of the best adventure games ever made", or so the box cover would have you believe.
Adventure games need to be interactive and while TLJ has brief periods where you can control the action you will spend 95% of your time LISTENING to dialog. All I can say is thankfully the dialog is spoken and the voice actors are some of the best I've heard in a long time. If I were to have to read all the conversation (i.e. Final Fantasy) I would have bailed on this game in the first hour.
The Longest Journey plays like most other classic adventure games. You explore the various levels and pick up every item that isn't nailed down no matter how useless it may seem at the time. Examining these items more closely can (and often does) reveal even more items such as your timesheet that is stuck in your diary that is required for you to get your paycheck. You will meet several characters during your adventure and while talking to them is not required, exploring all the dialog options helps to immerse yourself in the world and fill in the back-story. You will also get clues to solving some of the puzzles by talking with the proper person.
The characters in TLJ are interesting and well crafted; however, once you get them talking it is hard to shut them up. Your first encounter with Fiona (your lesbian landlady) can easily take up to 30 minutes if you exhaust all the topics. This trend repeats for almost all the other characters you encounter. Later on in the game you will meet a priest who dives into a monologue that lasted 18 minutes - and I only asked him one question. Fortunately the game keeps a written transcript of all conversations and even sorts them by chapter and encounter. This is most useful if you happen to doze off during the conversation. You can abort the spoken dialog one line at a time by repeatedly hitting the ESC key then go back and read the important parts later.
The puzzles in TLJ range from simplistic to insanely difficult and downright illogical. One puzzle has you trying to get a metal key from the electrified rail of the transit system. Getting this item requires you to construct a fishing rod out of a string, hose clamp, and an inflatable rubber ducky life preserver. The only thing more insane than that combination are the hoops you must jump through to even get those three items. Save yourself the frustration and download a strategy guide before you start to play this game.
The mix of action vs. story is just way too unbalanced to make this game enjoyable for most gamers. With the decreasing attention spans of today's youth and gamers who thrive on action and lots of it, The Longest Journey will put you to sleep long before it ever becomes fun.
The interface for TLJ is excellent. Everything is point and click and your options are based on the object/person you click on. You can move April around simply by clicking where you want to walk (or double-click to run) and clicking on hot-zones on the screen will bring up an intuitive sub-menu with an eye, hand, and mouth icon allowing you to look, manipulate or talk to the item or person. Right-clicking the mouse brings up the inventory screen where you can use the various objects using the same interface. Aside from a few shortcuts, you rarely have to even touch the keyboard.
Visually, The Longest Journey is stunning. Even though it is locked in at 640x480, the backgrounds are impressive and the movies are breathtaking. Cut scenes are frequently used to propel the story and these merge seamlessly with the live action parts of the game so when the movie ends you are controlling the character in the last frame of the movie. TLJ supports both 16 and 32 bit color and they both look great but the 32bit offers a much smoother rendering of the backgrounds and characters.
The game is played in a letterbox (wide screen) format, which helps to merge it with the frequent movies. The bottom portion of the screen is reserved for your dialog choices when conversation opportunities present themselves. Dialog options disappear as you select them and new ones appear as you open up new topics for discussion. It's a very simple yet functional design and interface.
Speaking of characters, TLJ suffers from the worst case of "jaggies" I've seen since Escape from Monkey Island. These jaggies are only present on the animated characters, but it is very noticeable and distracting to have blocky characters interacting on these gorgeous scenic backdrops. If you are fortunate enough to have a GeForce 2 or other FSAA supported graphics card and the latest drivers you can enable FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing) and smooth these characters out to near perfection.
The worlds you explore range from the futuristic yet mundane world of Stark (we call it Earth) to the fanciful world of Arcadia. April is able to shift between these worlds. At first these shifts are accidental, usually occurring while she sleeps or other inopportune times, but later she develops the talent to shift at will. Both worlds are uniquely crafted and filled with subtle details that really immerse you in the environment.
As noted earlier, the speech definitely has a stuttering problem and many people report never having solved it. The stuttering dialog can range from very frequent to once ever 2-3 minutes. Tweaking the sound adjustments can lessen or even eliminate this problem, but these adjustments are undocumented and you could spend several hours attempting to fix the problem. Despite the stutters, all of the dialog is delivered by highly skilled voice actors. April will comment on just about anything you can click on in the game (including herself) and often make amusing observations. The conversations are often laced with random swearing. This isn't done to offend, but rather add to the realism of modern day dialog. There is nothing gratuitous about the language (like that of Kingpin). It's just the way people talk. But there is enough swearing and adult subject matter such as sex and homosexual lifestyles that gets this game a "M" rating [Odd considering brutal acts of violence in other games warrant PG ratings... -Ed.].
The music is incredible and emotionally carries the story along. The sound effects and ambient noises for whatever environment you may find yourself in are accurate and of equal high quality. The use of positional sound is incredible. During one scene you are talking to Cortez in the art gallery and there is a doorman off-screen to the left asleep. Throughout the entire encounter you hear him snoring out of your left speaker while the conversation comes from your right speaker. Even in the initial dream prologue you can hear the babbling stream in your right speaker as you talk to the tree spirit.
The game box boasts over 50 hours of gameplay and there is reportedly over 12 hours of recorded dialog. You will spend most of your time listening to conversations and the rest of your time figuring out what to do next or how to solve one of the crazy puzzles. Very often you will be stuck and not know what to do next and have no way of knowing. This forces you to re-explore all available areas until you accidentally discover which location triggers the next sequence of events.
Quite often it is all too easy to get stuck because you missed a conversation topic or forgot to pick-up some random object like a leaf from the plant outside your apartment door. It's times like this the game can get very frustrating and force you to seek outside assistance or even a strategy guide.
My "Longest Journey" lasted about 63 hours and I used a strategy guide for just about everything after chapter 2. So even knowing what to do, this game lasts quite a long time. I would guess that even seasoned adventurers will spend upwards of 80+ hours on this game if you try to do it on your own.
The Longest Journey like most adventures is a solo experience. There is no online support and no reason to involve anyone else. You may want to have somebody nudge you ever hour or so and make sure you are still awake. I almost dozed off several times during the longer monologues.
It's great to see that adventure games are not dead, but The Longest Journey is a far cry from the adventure games of yesteryear. Funcom got a lot of things right with this game but they also fell into the popular traps of the genre. Puzzles are great when they are challenging and you can figure them out with a little research, but mixing up random inventory items to create crazy devices that MacGyver would never even think of is going a bit too far.
An adventure game needs to keep you involved. I recently returned the Dreamcast game Shenmue because it was 90% movies and 10% gameplay. When you have to sit there and watch/listen to hours and hours of dialog to only be rewarded with insane puzzles or trying to hunt the next location to trigger the next movie, the game ceases to be interactive entertainment and just becomes annoying.
The Longest Journey can be found in most stores for around $30-40 and there are rumors of a DVD special edition possibly coming to the US. I'm probably going to offend a lot of TLJ fans and I am certainly going against the mainstream reviewers, but I don't care. Despite the wonderful graphics, great voice acting and original story, I truly did not enjoy this game. The Longest Journey may be a glimpse of the future of adventure gaming, but hopefully designers that draw on its premise will be able to offer a better mix of interactivity than this game delivers.