Gameology 2.0

Review Of

Funcom. The Longest Journey. San Francisco, CA: Empire Interactive Entertainment, 1999.

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Last night, I completed Fun Com's 2000 hit game The Longest Journey. I'd bought the game a few days ago at the local Target, where it was available for only $10 on the bargain shelf. After reading the glowing reviewer's comments on the box and the various prizes it had won, I figured it was a winner and deserved a place on my gaming queue. The game apparently won PC Gamer's "Adventure Game of the Year" award, and plenty of reviewers whose opinions I highly value gave it similar praise. Let me just say right now that I don't see what all the hype was about. This could be because the things about TLJ that were so impressive in 2000 aren't so incredible five years later—and with the loss of that "wow" factor goes a great deal of the draw, at least as I can figure it. On the up side, this is an intelligent, almost "artistic" adventure game with plenty of literary resonance.

The box boasts about the "skeletal animation" system of the characters in the game and how realistic and "stunning" it all is. It's not. In fact, I had seldom played a game on my PC in which the characters looked so unconvincing and blocky. The backgrounds were beautiful, however, which seemed to only make the blocky "polygon" look of the characters stand out more. I saw little point to the animation system anyway, since your avatar's movements are so restricted. I'll say more on this later, but suffice it to say that I see no reason why all the animations couldn't have been pre-rendered and touched up. The boast on the box that April Ryan "leaves Lara Croft in the dust" is patently false. Lara looks better and moves better, even on the original PlayStation.

There is a great deal of dialogue and digitized speech in this game—or maybe I should say, there's a DELUGE of dialogue and speech in this game. You spend at least 75% of your time either listening to dialogue or (if you're like me) rapidly clicking through subtitles. There isn't much game here, actually. I'd compare it more to an animated feature with occasional puzzles or problems to solve—not quite as banal as Dragon's Lair gameplay, but close. If I had been reviewing this game for marketing, I'd have told them to cut the dialogue back by 60% and give the player more opportunities to interact with the game, but, alas, I wasn't. There is also another problem here—a great deal of the dialogue is decidedly R-rated (adult language is profuse here.) Of course, these profanities earned the game its M rating, but I saw little point in it. At the risk of sounding like a prude, I'd have liked to have an option to turn off the cursing. At times I felt the developers were trying to prove something (hey, this videogame cusses! *&* @$@!) instead of really using profanity to create a more realistic scenario. This is not a family friendly game, but it easily could have been. I think the game tried to be hard to be "mature," though in a very immature way. I was a bit worried at some points that the game might descend into soft porn, but that wasn't the case. The M rating is strictly for language.

I'd also have to criticize the non-intuitiveness of the puzzles. Several of the puzzles in TLJ fail what I call the "crack test" – i.e., the developers were smoking a certain substance when drafting and implementing the puzzles. I don't know how the heck anyone could solve Chapter 2 without hints or clues. Of course, that's assuming that a player could endure the hour or so of soap opera-like dialogue long enough to get to the puzzle in question. Yawn! The first few chapters are really bad about this; only those with a good attention span are likely to get past the boring parts. This is sad, because the game does get better.

All is not lost here. By Chapter Three, the game starts to get much more interesting and playable, and from there on it just gets better. We soon start to see some great Lucas Arts-style humor, and there are plenty of memorable characters and scenes here. A few scenarios stand out—there's a scene with a labyrinth and a mad alchemist that is simply classic, and your side-kick, "Crow," is a joy to have around. There is also an emotional depth here that we seldom, if ever, see in videogames. I know of few games that would tread into "dangerous" territory like this one. Your avatar, April Ryan, was abused by her stepfather, and this comes out mightily in a tear-jerking scene towards the end. This abusive childhood is reflected at various points in the game in a rather effective manner (such as an Empire Strikes Back-esque "Mirror Image" scene). The relationships among the characters are also more developed than in most games. The avatar's friendships with Charlie and Emma seem quite genuine, though I was unsatisfied with the enigmatic "Cortez," who simply is too enigmatic to really inspire much of the player's concern. Unfortunately, some of the main characters that your avatar interacts with a great deal—such as Tobias—are flat and boring, whereas some of the more intriguing characters (such as Holloway or Father Raul) get little attention.

There are plenty of fun allusions to pop culture and other adventure games. I found at least three references to Army of Darkness, one of my favorite films, and my wife pointed out one to The Little Shop of Horrors. There are also some fun Star Wars allusions and we discover that the Lord of the Rings trilogy is also popular in the world of magic, Arcadia. By the way, the magical world of Arcadia is FAR more interesting than the mundane world of Stark (TLJ relies on a dual-world conceit to explain magic). Maybe that's intentional, but the world of Stark is so boring that the time you spend there in the game amounts to some of the dullest moments in gaming, ever.

There are plenty of websites out there that will tell you all about TLJ's story and such, so I won't bother to include that here. What concerns me more is the problems of the interface and non-intuitive nature of so many of the puzzles (there's one with a band-aid patched inflatable duck, a clamp, and a clothesline that's about as dumb as any I've ever found in an adventure game). While I can't imagine myself ever playing through TLJ again, I would recommend it to anyone who really enjoys dialogue and a complex story and doesn't mind just sitting there watching a game instead of playing it. The voice acting is superb and much better that I've come to expect from games. While I didn't find the whole "guardian" story very interesting, I was pleased by the cyberpunk themes elsewhere in the game, particularly with the evil Church of Voltec. Where this game seems to innovate is with the depth of its characters and the portrayal of "taboo" topics like lesbianism, interracial relationships, and child abuse.