New Game: Dreamfall

It's here, it's here!

Dreamfall is the long awaited successor of The Longest Journey, the best (in my humble opinion) adventure game on the market, next to Syberia. The fans' patience was stretched to its fullest as the game's development took four years. Originally announced for a Q4 release in 2005, the game was postponed because the team's focus was to deliver quality, rather than making a deadline. This raised expectations of many critics and gaming communities alike.


"It's quite easily one of the most anticipated adventure games in years" - Gamespot

The challenging question "will it be as good as its predecessor?" was already partly answered positively during development phase by sneak previews during many game events and developer interviews.

I got the PC DVD release of the game yesterday. In case you wanna play for discjockey, it comes in a PC 6-CD release too. There's also an X-Box version. Anyway I'm addicted to it ever since I started to play. The gameplay is very different compared to The Longest Journey, but after 30 minutes you get the hang of it (this is the learning curve, as reviewers like to call it). The graphics are wonderful, the voice acting is superb and the musical score blends it all together.

Unlike The Longest Journey, your character can die so it is important to save your game often, which you can do at any point. If you don't have the reflex to save the game unti you finish playing, the autosave feature does this for you at critical stages in the game. These are so-called checkpoints. You can die in several ways, but one of them is during the combat mode, which is another new gameplay addition compared to Dreamfall's predecessor.

Tagline: "The future holds secrets only the past can reveal"

Also new is that you can play three different characters. You start off as Zoë, but very soon you will get introduced with April Ryan, the heroïn from the original game. A very interesting aspect of the game is that you can respond in different ways when talking to people. The way you respond might take you onto a different path in the storyline (if you like this concept, check The Pandora Directive). For me this is enough reason to start the game all over again once I finished it, to answer the eternal question in life: "what if?".

I already dare to call this the best game of 2006. If you are an adventure gamer, then you will definitely want this gem on your shelf.