Completed: The Longest Journey

Way back in my Amiga days I played some adventure games with the likes of Gobliiins 3 and of course Monkey Island. However between then and now there have not been many others. Although one stand out mention should go to Star Trek: TNG - A Final Unity which combines the adventure genre with a couple of other elements and was one of the first games I ever owned for PC. Of course even that was 16 years ago. The game which brought me back to the genre was of course Machinarium. After playing and enjoying that I decided I'd see what else there was available. This led me to the adventure section of the Steam catalogue, a section I'd not really looked at in detail before. There is quite a lot in there with a wide array of stories and difficulties. I figured the Nancy Drew ones were probably not aimed at me, but there are still a lot of other choices. Some were recent games which I'd not heard about. Others were older names of which I had some knowledge and understood to be classics such as Myst or The Longest Journey, so I decided to start there. I started playing The Longest Journey a while ago but was then distracted by other things. Finally I've got back to it over the last few days and this evening I completed it.

I talked about the great background art along with the low detail character models in my original first impressions post, so I won't go in to that here. Most of the puzzles in the game were fairly straightforward but there were a couple of exceptions and one point were I had to look up an answer. However unlike Machinarium the main strength of this game is the story not the puzzles. A tale of parallel worlds, one of magic and the other of logic, the balance between the two worlds is failing and it falls to you to restore it. I'm a big fan of alternate universes and also of science fiction and fantasy, so as this game has all of those together in one compelling story it was the perfect combination for me. The sound and music was great as was the voice acting. The graphics are looking dated but not enough to take you out of it while everything else around it so good. That's one more down from the long list of games I've been meaning to finish for ages. Next up will probably be its sequel, Dreamfall.