Hooray For Adventure Gaming

Dispensing of the "I have internet again... again" speech.

I've finally gotten around to playing Dreamfall, the sequel to the really-rather-excellent The Longest Journey. For the uninitiated, The Longest Journey was a point-and-click adventure game released in 2000 and set in the year 2209 which begins when university art student April Ryan is warned by a mysterious, slightly creepy drifter that her vivid, fantastical dreams and hallucinations are a lot closer to reality than she would like. I don't want to spoil too much because it just might be the single greatest narrative in gaming, and anyone interested really ought to discover for themselves just how poetic and thought-provoking it is. It's an absolutely stunning work both of storytelling in games, using the medium to do things non-interactive media can't, and of visual art, combining dirty urban chic, sleek and minimalist futurism, beautiful fantasy-novel-cover vistas, genuinely fantastical architecture and creature design, and pure abstract lunacy and crucially, made them all blend together naturally. It was also - are you listening, Broken Sword 3? - was the first game to ever make me cry, as well as being one of the earliest to recognise the importance of good acting in games.

But the game itself wasn't necessarily, always, very good. Too often it suffered from the kind of nonsensical puzzle design LucasArts and Revolution alone managed to transcend in the adventure genre's heyday. And remember that TLJ came a decade later than the genre's heyday - it's not as if developers Funcom didn't know the complaints people had against adventure gaming. Anyone who endured the clamp-and-inflatable-ring puzzles is sure to gnash their teeth at that particular memory.

Dreamfall picks up ten years later with a new character, clinically depressed bioengineering dropout Zoe Castillo, and a new location - the astonishingly beautiful Casablanca - and, seemingly, an entirely new story. Of course to the veteran there are plenty of callbacks to the first game and five simple words at one point: "Venice, Newport, The Fringe, Charlie" brought a grin to my face of a size and intensity normally reserved for hallucinogenic drugs. I do recommend playing the games in chronological order; although the opening of Dreamfall is welcoming to newcomers, the callbacks start piling up at quite a rate by the third chapter.

Even more than TLJ, Dreamfall is set in a world which is recognisably our own while remaining believably futuristic. I haven't completed it yet but neither the story nor the visual design are disappointing me thus far. The big new approach that got fans talking when it was announced was having multiple player characters - TLJ was an intensely personal story of one individual's journey of self-discovery. How could Dreamfall hope to be as intimate when you're hopping between different bodies every five minutes? Of course, it works just fine. These guys are maestros. The role of the protagonist was one of the first game's subtler themes (and the pivot point of one of its best plot twists), and in Dreamfall, it's pushed to the fore. Everyone has their own story - some may be wilder or more important on a large scale, but does that devalue those which aren't? This is why these games work far better as interactive experiences than non-interactive; by making the player directly, literally, the central character (or characters), the central character's relation to the narrative becomes more challenging and much more clearly focused.

However, there's always that tension between game and interactive story waiting to rear its ugly head. Dreamfall was widely criticised for stealth and action sequences which detract from the puzzles, and for the relative simplicity of those puzzles compared to the first game. It's certainly not the mental workout many old-school adventure fans were drawn to the genre for in the first place. There's an interesting interview with Longest Journey auteur Ragnar Tørnquist conducted by PC Gamer reviewer John Walker over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The whole three-part interview is fascinating, but the following excerpt was what interested me the most:

"Ragnar: I was reading on Rock, Paper, Shotgun that you’d said in your review of Dreamfall that you were overmarking it because you loved the game, but you advised people not to buy the game!"

"RPS: No! It was a caveat… Well, I’m not going to be polite. As an interactive experience, it just didn’t work. I felt uninvolved for so long, just listening to conversations. That every single one of those conversations is beautiful, and joy to listen to, is why it survives. But it didn’t form together in a coherent game for me.

"Ragnar: I respect that opinion. I don’t have a problem with critical reviews so long as they’re well argued, with at least a certain element of understanding what we were trying to do. I don’t agree with you, but what I do agree with is that the game did not succeed with all the things we tried to do. Obviously with combat, because we struggled with it, and the way it ended up was something last-minute, and not how we wanted to do it. Looking back I would have done it very differently. I would have done it in a more adventure-type way. In a way that didn’t require reflexes. How you respond is the most important thing. But I do think the game is better than some people give it credit for. Obviously the story is the key there, and that’s the thing: the story has to work, the dialogue has to work, and the characters have to work. And everything else is gravy."

Wow! There's a lot to think about there. Obviously as far as Ragnar is concerned, Dreamfall is a story first and a game second, but it seems that John was looking for a game as much as a story. It's Metal Gear Solid 2 all over again. Many reviewers and pundits argue that we want to play games rather than watch them, that endless cutscenes and conversations are detrimental to the experience. I'm not so sure I agree, at least not completely - Half-Life's all-in-game approach may have rightly been regarded as revolutionary but does that mean every game since should have followed in the same footsteps? Maybe story-led experiences such as Dreamfall and MGS2 were poorly marketed when described games, although obviously few developers would want their game to be labelled an 'interactive movie' in this day and age. Maybe a new epithet is needed. Whatever. To me, marking down these experiences for not being interactive enough is kinda like marking down a novel for not having a good enough soundtrack. It's a different experience and should be judged accordingly. Maybe Dreamfall doesn't get my blood pumping the same way a good racing game or first-person shooter does, but then, more action-led genres rarely stimulate me philosophically and politically or provoke anything but the most cursory and cheaply-induced empathy with the characters. If anything Dreamfall suffered for being too action-led where it really shouldn't have been, apparently learning little from the lessons of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. Compare to, say, Beyond Good & Evil or The Wind Waker for examples of mixing action with adventure smoothly, both released three years before Dreamfall, and Funcom's game does seem out of date in that regard. But we return to semantics - how many people, realistically, are going to buy anything which effectively advertises itself as a 'game without action'?

I also recently tried out the demo of Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, and it's a lot of fun. Again, the puzzles are mostly very simple but there's a lot to see and a lot of comedy, as you'd expect - the humour of the Homestar Runner website has definitely has made the transition to games intact. Nice to see it's mostly been reviewed well, except by Edge, but then I rarely agree with Edge anyway. Maybe traditional adventures and story-over-gameplay releases do have a market after all? Anyway, it's recommended for fans of LucasArts, Sam 'n' Max and the old, good Simon the Sorcerers. Speaking of which: Simon 4? Saw the review in the last PCZone, but I've never seen any mention of it in any retailer, either in-store or online. Wikipedia has only the most basic of pages for it and the official site is almost useless; apparently it was out in the UK in March and in Germany over a year ago. The best PCZ said of it was that it was better than Simon 3, as if it could be much worse, and it got 51%, which appears to be about average as far as review scores for the game go.

Final bit of adventure gaming related news: Insecticide is also a few months old and never received any attention in the UK. It has a nice Rare/Telltale looking vibe and from the screenshots seems like it could be fun in a Psychonauts kind of a way, but it doesn't seem to be available in the UK currently nor have a UK release date yet. I'm sure full a rant about region-based distribution of online games will follow at some point, but for now, I'll just say that if devs are so concerned about getting adventure games popular again that they'll crowbar in action sequences where there really ought not to be any, arbitrarily dividing the market isn't exactly going to help matters.