The Longest Journey is probably one of the best Point & Click adventure games ever made, allying great character development, astounding world-building and a sensational feeling of being in a fairytale. Dreamfall clumsily tried to implement fighting sequences and at the same time expand the scale of the first game with three playable characters instead of a single one.

I appreciated the developer’s effort and like many was left thunderstruck by the final cliffhanger and so like every worldwide fan of the series, I was happy to pay for the kickstarted episodic sequel: Dreamfall Chapters.

After finishing the final chapter of the game, I feel conflicted. On one hand, I really wanted to love DC as I am already in love with the setting and the characters. On the other hand, the game is just not very... fun to play and lost what made the prequels so interesting in the first place.

Gameplay-wise, the game has "lite-adventure" mechanics à la Telltale Games: minimal inventory, minimal interactions and rich dialogue paths replaced by "important" decisions affecting the next chapters. The first two chapters' pace is dreadful and a map button to navigate is nowhere to be seen! The in-game maps are kinda terrible too. The third character's segments consist of hidden objects searches, which is quite frankly boring. Characters' inner monologues are usually funny and a nice touch but that's about it. I never feel challenged or interested in the gameplay and ended focusing only on the story itself.

Story starts as intriguing asking many essential questions about the setting and the relationship between Arcadia & Stark. Unfortunately, as it unfolds it drops the ball. Instead of antagonists, we get cardboard like cliches and the crux of the plot turns into a generic mambo-jumbo of cosmic balance. Main characters personalities seems to change from episode to episode (and not by the player's own twisted hand). The new playable character felt like a cheap addition too. One might say that it kinda IS her point but it felt too disjointed from Kian's and Zoe's driving goals and ends up a cheap Deus Ex Machina.

Not everything is bad obviously, far from it. Developers tried to do their best with the tight budget and offer a great art direction, excellent voice-acting and neat music. Some set pieces are great and I finally got the closure I wanted. The epilogue is a nice touch all in all. I shed my little tear.

All in all, I feel like the episodic structure and the presence of three playable characters just kill the game. You don't have time to grow attached, you don't have time to care as you go from obvious story twists to dramatic cutscenes and other expository dumps. The scale was too big for embracing the Telltale structure, which is more akin to pulp literature and comics than lengthy enthralling fairy-tales/coming-of-age stories like TLJ/Dreamfall.

In France, we have a saying "Whatever the flask, provided that one gets the drunkenness". I got my drunkenness alright but it was a cheap vodka-orange in a plastic cup.

What a fantastic game well worth the money.It kept me interested from start to finish.Hope they make some more of this series.

love it great game for all must buy

Five Word Review: A beautiful and grand adventure .
Favorite Thing: The art style. I really like the look of this game.
Least Favorite Thing: Animation quality varied heavily between excellent and terrible.

Playtime: ~ 25h
Enjoyment: 8/10
Recommendation: Absolutely, and don't worry about not having played (or remembering) the previous games.

Dreamfall Chapters is an adventure game, and its the third game in the series which also includes The Longest Journey, and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey.

The story takes place on two worlds which exist in different dimensions, Earth (also known as Stark), which is focused on science, and Arcadia, which is focused on magic. Earth is only inhabited by Humans, most of whom don't know that Arcadia exists, whereas Arcadia is also inhabited by several different races, and the whole parallel worlds thing is common knowledge. A very small number of people have the ability to travel between worlds.

The player controls two characters, Zoe Castillo, who lives on Earth, and Kian Alvane, who lives on Arcadia. Zoe is just an ordinary young woman, struggling to figure out what to do with her life, until she gets caught up in a sinister plot involving the world's leading entertainment company and their dream machines (similar to Virtual Reality devices, but the user is asleep and has control over their dreams). Kian is a soldier for the Azadi nation, who starts to realise that his people are kind of evil, and the massive tower they're building might not actually be a good thing.

Gameplay involves making dialogue choices during conversations with other characters, and quite often there are decisions to make which will influence how the story plays out. There's also plenty of opportunity to explore and interact with the environment, and a decent amount of puzzle solving.

Zoe's character and storyline are really interesting. She's got a family and a boyfriend, and she's living in a massive city called Europolis, the year is something like 2220 so the technology is advanced, there are huge skyscrapers, neon lights, vibrant music, and the city is alive with people wandering around, doing their own thing.

By contrast, I found Kian's sections to be a bit dull. He's completely lacking in personality, and he's a soldier in a game that features no combat, so he's just kind of pointless. And even though Arcadia is supposed to be full of magic, you don't really see it very often. The main city, Marcuria, is much smaller and quieter than Europolis, and at times just feels a bit dead. The one good thing about Arcadia is a supporting character called Crow. He's a talking bird, and he is awesome, much more entertaining than Kian.

Voice acting is really good all around (including Kian - its the same actor who gave a good performance in Dragon Age 2 as male Hawke, so I think the problem with this character lies more with the script than the actor). The graphics look fantastic. I didn't get a consistent 60 FPS, but that's not really necessary in this kind of slow paced adventure, so I left all the settings at max. I didn't suffer any bugs or crashes, and I played with my X360 controller. It took me 25 hours to finish, so value for money is good at full price.

Dreamfall Chapters is a really enjoyable game, and if you like a good story, I definitely recommend playing this. Even though I've been quite negative about Kian, the game is still worth playing for Zoe's story, as well as every scene involving Crow. I would also strongly advise you to play Dreamfall: TLJ (the second game in the series) first, because that game ends in a cliff-hanger, and DC continues directly on from that point. I think you need to play D:TLJ to fully understand the story of DC.

However, I'd say you can probably skip The Longest Journey (the first game in the series). While some characters do appear in all 3 games, the story from the first game doesn't really have much relevance for the other 2 games. (TLJ is also harder to recommend because its a more stereotypical point and click adventure, involving puzzles based around crazy logic and combining random objects).

If you are a fan of The Longest Journey and Dreamfall you will be very disappointed with the final entry in the series. I myself am a big fan of TLJ and I don't think Dreamfall was such a bad game, it had weird gameplay mechanics, but story and main theme was dark and interesting. And now we have Dreamfall Chapters...

Music: I don't have any complains here soundtracks were decent.

Graphics: nothing new or fantastic here, game looks decent, but suffers from bad optimization.

Gameplay: below average. No real puzzles, mostly running around the cluncky map doing fetch quests.

Controls: haven't changed much from Dreamfall.

Game world: it lost the feel of TLJ and Dreamfall games. Stark is typical dystopian, Bladerunerish affair. Arcadia is no longer the magical place full of mystery and adventure but your typical day to day world you live in. Sexual identity problems, nazi deathcamps, nations invading other nations and a dash of political correctness for a good measure. I don't think any of us come to adventure games to get preached on every social problem imaginable.

Deus Ex Machina status: yeap it's here and it's doing its thing as always.

Villain: Darth Vader everyone.

I give it 4/10. Forget it even exists. There is only The Longest Journey.

This is "game" is a masterful work of Art, hinged on rich, intelligent storytelling. I laughed, cried, raged; my heart ached. At times, various technical problems made it difficult to enjoy, but in the end, Dreamfall had a powerful effect on me. I fell in love with the characters, was mesmerized by the imaginative worlds and actually cared about what was happening. I haven't encountered a story in games as complex, ambitious and portentous as this one. It has deep social, and even spiritual implications and it's uncanny how it seems to have predicted the current political climate in the US (albeit in an exaggerated, fantastical way).

Yes, there are a few cringe-worthy, heavy handed bits (mostly right at the start), but overall I've never been more engaged. I was highly impressed with the quality of writing and consistency of voice-acting. Not too sure what some are complaining about there, as I can hardly think of better examples, at least not anywhere in indie games. It's clearly not for everyone; It's really more of an interactive story with consequences to your decisions than a traditional game. The gameplay is not particularly strong and the interface is frustratingly clunky. It's often unclear what to do or how to progress and the frame-rate is wildly inconsistent.

If you have a more than passing interest in subjects like dreaming, the occult, the nature of reality and consciousness, you stand a good chance of having your mind blown and your heart touched. This is by far my favorite installment in the series and I look forward to the next, though I imagine I'll be an old man by then...

This game definitely closed the chapter on my interest in this series, hoho~

Between cringeworthy writing and stiff animations there's a half-baked adventure game with silly puzzles, wonky controls, inconsistent characters and a somewhat ambitious story that feels poorly executed.

If you don't mind loading screens, performance issues and barely competent writing paired with mediocre voice acting you should definitely try out Dreamfall Chapters!

It's kind of sad when a game decades in the making is inferior to both the critically acclaimed first entry AND to the much maligned sequel.

Dreamfall TLJ was criticized for not sticking to a single coherent story, but instead spreading itself too thin across 3 playable characters. No lessons have been learned here - in fact, the writing is even worse and more scattershot. We spend three chapters running fetch quests across boring and generic fantasy / cyberpunk cities, and then two chapters having every random thought that popped into the writers head thrown at us, with no rhyme or reason.

The gameplay mostly consists of navigating vast empty spaces, hoping to pixel hunt the few points of interest within them, and long (often unskippable) dialogs written by someone in love with the sound of their own typing.

Just stick with the original The Longest Journey. Pretend neither sequel exists. You'll be better off.