REVIEW – Wait, what? An adventure game in present day? Yeah; despite some of the gaming genres being pushed aside, almost none of them can be knocked out, so to say. It’s not an issue because it’s great to have some changes in the usual end-of-the-year game rush. Dreamfall Chapters’ first episode has arrived at the best possible time. Does the Norwegian team still have the power within?

Dreamfall‘s release was a long time ago, let’s put it that way. It was more than eight years ago when the Scandinavian boys and girls at Funcom has created that game, avoiding the PS3 in the process… but Zoë’s and the others’ story wasn’t bad, but even by that point, adventure games – and GOOD ones, to be more specific – became trickling in terms of releases at best. A few years have gone by and the story is continuing. This time around, it was us, the players, who funded the creation of this project – on Kickstarter, it racked in more than 1.5 million dollars! Impressive.

We’re in three dimensions

There’s not a big limitation this time around as it was in Dreamfall: in that game, it was clearly visible that the player was put into a cage, despite being in a three-dimensional area – you weren’t really able to stray away from the story that much. This is still around here, but in a smaller amount – I need to explain this: don’t really expect a fully open world, but you can look around in a much bigger area compared to Dreamfall… and this is despite the game being in an episodical format, the cake’s only got its first slice on the table yet.

Power in Unity?

The last time I got my hands on a Unity Engine-powered game, my jaw has dropped how… bad it was actually. I wasn’t able to understand how Codemasters could simply port the Android/iOS version of Colin McRae Rally Remastered to the PC like that. The bad taste is gone in my mouth though: there’s no reason to be mad at the physics in Dreamfall Chapters – it’d be interesting for that to happen though!

What about the story? If you’ve played Dreamfall, or maybe 1999 The Longest Journey game, then Zoë Castillo’s name will be known to you. She returns, coming out of her coma, going into elections. Kian’s locked into Arcadia’s world, the third main character will be April Ryan. And this is where I should point out something: in the beginning, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on. Okay, fine, I’m in Europolis, but somehow I didn’t fully understand the story! But wait, Zoë’s not out of coma yet, because Storytime’s world is anything BUT real, making it feeling like it’s our inner voice’s world. We must get to that dream machine. And then there’s Kian, who’s happened to be waiting for execution, but ends up being saved, as the people revolt against the executing. That’s pretty much all that Kian’s getting, this segment felt very weak in Book One.

Still has its touch though

If I state that Book One’s story is not a strong point of the game, I wouldn’t really be far off. Thankfully, the gameplay didn’t get butchered: you have to go and talk to several persons, and the puzzles are still nicely done. You’ll also have to face decisions, later on, testing your morality: do you want to save that person or not? These decisions will be shown to you at the end of the episode – hm, I think I have seen this in Telltales’ games! Speaking of which, the next review will be the second season of The Walking Dead from me.

Looks and sounds decent

The way the dialogues are written is stunning. The characters have good voice actors backing them up, and their speech wasn’t written in two minutes either. The developers’ experience is shining through these, clearly. The game doesn’t look bad either; the combination of the PlayStation 4 and the Unity Engine 4 is working very well.
However, I gotta say that I don’t recommend getting just Book One. It’s short, the puzzles’ don’t give too much of a challenge and Kian’s part felt slapped on as well. Although the target is a new franchise creation, the past two games’ storyline feels like pulling DC back a little bit.

I can recommend buying this for adventure games’ fans, but for the others, I advise waiting for the other parts. It gets done as quick as a slice of bread gets eaten, however, the taste is good. Did our tongues get burnt from a number of action games?

-V-

Publisher: Red Thread Games

Developer: Red Thread Games

Genre: adventure

Publication: 2014 October 21