Even two decades after its release, The Longest Journey hasn’t lost its hold on players’ imaginations. Except now, satisfying that nostalgia fix doesn’t have to mean stomaching those 1999 graphics thanks to a high-res makeover mod released last week.

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This is the end, my only cyberfriend, the end. Episode 5 of adventure game Dreamfall Chapters [official site] launched last night and, unless something strange and wonderful happens, that will likely be the end of the whole thing. It’s the end of Dreamfall and it’s the end of its overarching series The Longest Journey.

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MMORPG specialists Funcom have revealed more details about their ominous theme park-set single-player outing The Park [official site]. Although it’s the studio’s first solo-playing venture in nine years – Dreamfall: The Longest Journey in 2006 being the last – The Park takes place in The Secret World‘s wider universe.

The latest trailer asks ‘What is The Park?’, before taking a behind-the-scenes peak beyond the rope barrier as it arrives at an answer.

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It’s easy to forget that Red Thread Games is working on anything other than Dreamfall Chapters because, well, Dreamfall Chapters>. But last year, the viking-est man in game development, Ragnar Tornquist, and his band of merry yarn-spinners announced first-person survival horror adventure Draugen, which does not sound much like Dreamfall at all. Tornquist has instead opted to plant its ragged bones between Gone Home and Amnesia, a description that has me quite intrigued indeed. Debut trailer below.

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We all have our cultural blind-spots. Knowing nothing about it, The Longest Journey disappointed me, because it wasn’t a high-speed jeep journey across a post-apocalyptic landscape, but instead a story about a girl with a magicface and two addresses or something. Oh, I don’t know, why isn’t Adam writing this article? I was quite happy polishing my purple men and their guns.

Anyway, it seems that there’s now a trailer for the next Dreamfall game, which by a miraculous coincidence appears with less than a week to go on the Kickstarter campaign for that very same game>. Conspiracy? I leave you to decide. (more…)

Oh, so on Sunday, in the middle of our yacht-based hammocking, my retrospective of Dreamfall went up on Eurogamer. The conflict the game generates in me was interesting to explore, and once again its moving story of faith and Faith won out. For instance, I utter:

“This isn’t a game that’s worried about drawing in the kids. In fact, it’s imbued with a strong tone of melancholy that it absolutely does not let go of throughout. This is a downbeat game, and goodness knows that’s rare. But it’s not so one-dimensional as to be miserable. Within the trauma, the sadness, the directionless confusion of people’s lives, is a message of extraordinary optimism, a resounding cry of hope. Because there’s faith.”

You can read the rest of it here. And I really whole-heartedly recommend reading my interview with creator Ragnar Tørnquist. I think it’s one of the best things wot I’ve done.