The Humble Classics Return Bundle is an impressive collection of games for oldsters and people who'd like to try playing as one. One single, solitary dollar is all you need for Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse, Shadowrun Returns, Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure, and Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director's Cut. But if you have more dollars, you get more games. 

Shadowrun: Hong King Extended Edition, Wasteland 2: Director's Cut Digital Deluxe Edition, Age of Wonders 3, and Xenonauts will be added to the mix for beating the average purchase price, which right now is about seven bucks. And at the top tier of $15 or more, you'll also get Torment: Tides of Numenera and Dreamfall Chapters: The Final Cut Edition. The Tesla Effect soundtrack is also included at any tier, and Mark Morgan's excellent Wasteland 2 soundtrack comes in at the beat-the-average price. 

It's obviously a very narrative-intensive bundle and that's not going to be for everyone, but it's a great deal for anyone with even a passing interest in RPGs or adventures: Most of the games in the bundle are worth the $15 price tag entirely on their own. The Humble Classics Return Bundle will be available until March 6.

At the start of the year we brought you the news that Dreamfall Chapters' "Final Cut" update would arrive this March—'March' being a word that here means, apparently, 'July'. OK so it's a bit late, but you can now play Red Thread Games' five-part episodic adventure with enhanced art and sound effects, improved performance, and a few other pleasant additions, and that's not bad at all for a free update, now is it?

The Final Cut update is detailed here on Steam, but it's also available on GOG, and on both stores you can currently buy the whole adventure with a sizable 40% discount. The free patch adds playable deleted scenes, an in-game map, a concept art gallery, and a character library, but also the following stuff:

• Improved art and sound, including new and revised character models, improved lighting, an expanded soundtrack, remastered voice-overs and reworked sound effects
• Improved performance
• Improved controller support
• Improved German and French localisation
• Support for save slots
• Updated Unity game engine
• A HUGE amount of smaller bug fixes (seriously, the list is too long to post here)

Red Thread Games has announced in a Kickstarter update that Dreamfall Chapters, the five-part episodic sequel to The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, will be released for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in March. This is of interest to us because coinciding with that, the studio will also put out an updated "Final Cut" edition of the game for the PC. 

"We’re very excited about this opportunity to revisit Chapters one final time. There are several improvements and changes we’ve wanted to make for years—along with requests and suggestions from our players and community—and we finally have the time and resources to address them," Red Thread wrote. "There are changes to character art and animations, music, sound-effects, shaders, lighting—and gameplay. We’ll be talking specifics soon, and we’ll have more on the console enhancements and special features before March 24th." 

The update also apologizes for the delay in a couple of patches, one incorporating a German language pack and the other with overdue in-game rewards, that were promised in September. "Staffing challenges, particularly in project management and QA," are blamed for the holdup, but those have been cleared up and the first of the promised updates is now in QA testing. 

"Things Take Time—almost four years now—but we haven’t left  Dreamfall Chapters behind," Red Thread wrote. "Far from it! We’re still very much focused on  completing the journey in a way we can all be proud of."

The Dreamfall Chapters announcement trailer for the PS4 is below.

Red Thread has been very busy this year developing the fourth chapter of the adventure game series, while simultaneously porting all previous entries to the Unity 5 engine. The Unity 5 update went live last Monday, and part four, "Revelations", is out this Thursday December 3. 

It has been a tough process. The Unity 5 upgrade and Revelations were due out in October, but the port job was much bigger than expected. Red Thread's Ragnar T rnquist documents the struggle of a "protracted and painful beta phase" on Medium. Every lighting element in every chapter had to be revisited to generate new light maps, while shaders and scripts had to be rewritten.T rnquist estimates that the upgrade set the studio back by $150,000.

It sounds like the work has been worth it, though. "The new engine has provided us with the tools we needed to not just improve internal production pipelines and optimise performance, but also to up the stakes when it comes to visual quality — particularly in terms of lighting, shaders and materials, and visual effects."

You'll find the evidence in the Revelation's trailer above. This is chapter four of five, and the series is available as a single purchase for 24 / $30 on GOG and the Humble Store, and is currently half-price on Steam.

Episodic adventure fans now have something to look forward to this week, as "Book Three" of Red Thread's Dreamfall Chapters will be released this Thursday, June 25. The third chapter is teased in the trailer above, which—like every other episodic adventure trailer in the history of gaming—talks about choice and consequence.

Previously it was revealed that Book Three of Dreamfall Chapters is re-introducing a character from previous Dreamfall/The Longest Journey games.

It doesn't look like we've reviewed either of the first two episodes, but Richard Cobbett did write about the series' world as part of his Critical Paths series.

Episode two of the new Kickstarted Dreamfall series of adventure games will be here on March 10, which gives us plenty of time to mull over the events of today's teaser trailer, in which a man is punched, an arrow is caught mid-flight and clothes are forgotten in an awkward meeting between Zoe and a giant elderly frog man.

Episode two introduces a new city called Marcuria and continues the dual stories of Kian and Zoe as they puzzle their way through their respective realities, one set in a fantasy world full of men shooting arrows, and another set in a glowing cyberpunk future.

For analysis on Book One's attempt to bring back this much-loved series, check out Richard Cobbett's Critical Paths piece.

How's your day going? Mine is almost entirely booked out by playing with internet wizards. So let's make this brief:

Episodic adventure Dreamfall Chapters is releasing its second chapter, "Rebels," on 10 March.

It's slightly later than planned—the Red Thread team had originally planned to release next week. "The wait between the first two episodes has been longer than expected," writes 'Team RTG'. "This is due to a number of factors, including the massive scope of the second episode — up to 50% bigger than Book One, which took an average of four hours to play through — the technical challenges in building (and bug fixing) a functioning framework for an episodic game, and the very, very long test cycle involved in a choice-and-consequence based game that's now approaching ten hours in length after only two episodes."

The lack of bug testing is given as a reason for the delay—the extra couple of weeks allowing the devs to fix and polish. "We do anticipate a more rapid development process for Book Three, however, which is already well into production. Books Four and Five will arrive later this year, concluding the story of Zo Castillo, the Dreamer."

Here are some concepts referred to in this trailer for Dreamfall Chapters: 1) The Undreaming, 2) The Storytime, 3) The Thief of Dreams. Not the most accessible of introductions to the series then, but one that should nevertheless whet fans' appetites for the release of Book Two: Rebels.

Dreamfall Chapters is the follow up to Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, which was itself a follow up to The Longest Journey. According to the trailer, the second release in this new episodic adventure is "coming soon".

Previously, Richard Cobbett wrote about the success of Chapters' cyberpunk world, as part of his Critical Paths series.

"Okay, yes, the flat is awful. The ventilation system rarely works. It's hot. It smells weird. There's no sunlight and people talk funny. But I like the energy. I like the diversity. There are art galleries and cinemas and a thousand million food carts. I had a pierogi for lunch and it was delicious. Sure, there are seedy sex-clubs, illegal dream emporiums and people urinating on the streets. But at least it's genuine urination. Urination with gusto."

The Longest Journey is the story of two worlds; our own of science, Stark, and the land of Arcadia where magic infuses everything. On the surface, it's a fairly stock premise; fiction is full of tales of people slipping from mundane reality to something more interesting, usually finding solutions to their real-world problems while there and returning a better, more enlightened person. Think The Neverending Story, The Silver Chair, or of course the most beloved example, the novelisation of Castlevania 2. It's a classic set-up, allowing for the fantasy to be witnessed from our perspective, and ground what happens there in more realistic fears like bullying and loss.

What makes its take slightly different though is that 'our' world isn't the modern one, but the 23rd century - a place of megacorporations and towering cities of glass and light, corrupt police and economic unfairness. In the new Dreamfall Chapters, set in a city called Europolis, the omnipresent darkness is so bad that one company has jazzed up the middle of heroine Zoe Castillo's home plaza by building an artificial sun - though one with the friendly warning "Original Consumer Goods would like to remind you not to stare directly at our sun, as it may cause blindness and tumours."

I've always found Stark a much more interesting place than Arcadia, which is a bit odd since I usually find cyberpunk hard to take seriously. They're rarely worlds where you can imagine people actually living, and by living I don't mean hanging around in alleys or hunting robots in the torrential rain. Stark though, despite on the surface being very similar to most of them, and especially in the dodgier bits, has a very distinct flavour of its own. It's hands down one of my favourite cyberpunk style universes, largely because it feels like it was designed by architects to be a place people live, rather than existing purely to push a dark, oppressive menace.

What makes it different is perspective, both on the creative side, and the viewpoint that we get on it. The Longest Journey notably introduced Stark through the eyes of two artists - its main character, April Ryan, as an art student, and the series' creator Ragnar T rnquist, patterning her district of Venice (our first impression of this world) on New York's East Village. Look up and you see the cyberpunk city of Newport with all its drugs and hackers and filth. Look around though and what you see are people, working in cafes, squabbling, screwing, fighting for their dreams and everything that you'd see today, only with really filthy canals and the occasional really weird puzzle. It's a dystopia to to be sure, but one where people can hope to live rather than simply exist, that still has time for magic in its own way - represented early on by art and love, and later with the likes of friendship and sacrifice.

Skip forward to Dreamfall Chapters and the world is a distinctly worse place, not least because Dreamfall didn't go particularly well for Team TLJ. Dreams have become the latest drug, the streets are full of junkies, and even those who can hook themselves up are increasingly finding themselves trapped in endless nightmares. Worse, it seems like the most popular show around is the millionth series of Eurotrash (NSFW), yet not once has Mr. Penguin returned to spread joy to the world, or the Romeo Cleaners turned up to wash away the filth of the streets without their trousers on.

Despite its problems though, and Zoe very clearly still fighting the depression she had at the start of Dreamfall, it's not the problems that really stand out in her district - Propast - but the sense of life. Put bluntly, and unlike most cyberpunk worlds I've seen, just about everything you see is there to reinforce that the people who live here actually give a shit. The main topic of conversation is an upcoming political election, and while it's pointed out that none of them are going to save the world, there's a buzz on the streets as everyone discusses their favourite candidates. There are police checkpoints, but there are also big (peaceful) demonstrations protesting them, instead of everyone just rolling over and accepting that things are what they are. There's no shortage of decay, and at least informed danger when it comes to bad streets and gangsters and the increasing police presence. But there's also excitement, life, and passion, as well as a cultural mix of everyone from punks with holographic mohawks to girls in mass-produced Bingo T-Shirts. It's a place you can imagine people choosing to live, not simply being trapped to await death.

(It's also worth noting that the place is actually populated for once, with crowds of people ambling around instead of coming up with some bullshit justification for why the streets are empty. It's not exactly Hitman: Blood Money's Mardi Gras, but there's more than enough to feel like a living place without NPCs getting in the way. I also appreciate the amount of incidental dialogue, even if I do wish it was mixed up a bit so that you weren't always triggering the same soundbites about "Kaiser" Constantine or whatever while trying to find somewhere with this awful, awful map...)

Much like The Longest Journey, one of the most visible and important aspects of this is that the people have art. Zoe's friend Emma is opening up a new gallery in the plaza where she lives. The brewery across the street uses glowing angel imagery. The corporate adverts for Bingo cola and Dream Machines share the visual space with art installations and memorials and now decaying posters for a better Europe that didn't come to pass, but still speak of the foundations of the city being built on optimism rather than pessimism or necessity, and little flourishes of that spirit still existing. It's a place of sensory overload, but one where if you duck down into a corner you'll find a man with a guitar still able to draw a crowd taken from every walk of life with nothing more than a quiet, sad song sung from the heart. It's a place that feels harsh and uncaring, but which still takes time to erect a memorial statue to the victims of the Collapse from the previous game, and where tourists will visit to see the sights - much as Zoe's diary mentions her taking a trip elsewhere before we rejoin her.

It's a beautifully executed world, give or take a certain maze like element and a truly terrible map system, and absolutely believable - very close to Shenmue in approach, albeit on a budget that precludes the same depth and scale. The people wandering around and just sitting and doing things, the heavy use of diegetic music (music that comes from an in-universe source, like a radio or a singer), the light leak effects and animated backgrounds are all splendid. What really sells it though are the details, and in particular Zoe's bursts of genuine enthusiasm in contrast to the moments where she's trying to convince herself that everything is going great - her excitement at being somewhere new, love of the local coffee shop, the food carts that she claims sells the best food in town - presumably not including her boyfriend's cheese soup.

Most notably though, there's the depth of it. While her journey is of course due to take her to other worlds and get caught up in multidimensional conspiracies, her willingness to see a future in Propast makes it feel like a place where futures can be had. There's a point where she talks about moving, but notably only elsewhere in the district. It doesn't, like so many others, feel like a city built for her story, merely the one where her story takes place. Nor does it feel like one where people are inherently trapped. For all the dream junkies on the streets, you see a lot of clearly successful people walking around, and a sense that people care about it for what it is. Even when Zoe brings up the idea of moving, she's only suggesting moving elsewhere in the district, and her stated goal of moving forward isn't stopping her trying to put down roots by making friends and trying to persuade herself that she's political.

"Five reasons I hate Europolis. There's no sun. None. It's always raining. Always. There's no vegetation. No trees, no plants, no grass. None. They claim to speak English but it's littered with slang words like 'mause' and 'bulle'. I don't understand half of what they're saying. Did I mention there's no sun? Fuck this.

But oh, it's fantastic and I love it. Zoe, contradictions, you are full of them!"

She is. And that's mirrored in the city, both the bits she touches and the ones in a skybox and so as untouchable as the surface of the moon. Propast is neither heaven nor hell, utopia nor complete dystopia, but a flawed, fascinating district where a lost soul can just as easily be found as sink into the gutter. That's what makes it such a wonderful piece of design. It's a perfect mirror of both Zoe's depression and her optimism, at least in this opening chapter, but beyond that I can't think of many in-game cities that have so neatly encapsulated everything that one can be in just a few relatively cramped streets. I can't think of any that have quite as neatly understood that it's the people as much as the architecture that make them what they are.

Europolis. It's a small glimpse, but it's already one of my favourite game cities.

Though if there was an achievement for smashing those ****ing street maps, I absolutely guarantee I'd have unlocked it in about five minutes. Grrrr.