The Longest Journey, p1.
Released: Nov. 17, 2000. Started: Jun. 11, 2023.
This game was only 9.99 on Steam, which means I got it for free using the money I had saved up from selling trading cards on the community market. I have never felt a greater sense of achievement. The game itself was barely over a gigabyte, which I have to imagine sounded like a very large amount of storage at some point in the distant past.
- Intro
- Prologue: A Lion is in the Streets
- Chapter One: Penumbra
- Chapter Two: Through the Looking-Glass
- Chapter Three: Friends and Enemies
- Outro
Intro
First of all, this game is teeny weeny. It plays in a tiny little window and if I try to rescale it it kind of freaks out and plays a lot of really loud noises, and sometimes the screen goes all white, so I’m just letting it be itty bitty. But it’s cute! And it runs!!! So that’s already a pretty good start, considering its age, and the fact that I’m running it on an M2 Mac instead of the giant cube-shaped plastic PC that it would probably prefer. There’s a little bit of input lag on the mouse, which is obviously annoying in a point-and-click, but it’s at least not unplayably clunky. The pre-rendered animations run about as smoothly as I could hope for most of the time but occasionally break out into low-frame-rate slideshows that feel more like the game battling against my modern hardware than an intended stylistic choice. I decided I would rather just get into the game than spend a million years fiddling with settings to get it running perfectly, so if some ornery computer expert is reading this and backseat troubleshooting, just know that I wrote this in the past and I can’t hear you.
The only reason I even know this game exists is that I’ve played the Dreamfall Chapters, which is the third game in the series. Out of curiosity I watched a playthrough of the second game, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, on YouTube, which means I’m going through the story completely backwards. I know where April ends up, even if I have no idea how she gets there. But I adore point-and-click adventures and I love both sci-fi and fantasy, so this was an obvious first choice for my foray into the world of weird turn-of-the-millenium gaming.
Prologue: A Lion is in the Streets
Then some evil goo attacks April! Oh no!!!!
Chapter One: Penumbra
April wakes up (for real, this time) in her little apartment in Newport, North America, in the year 2209. We learn from April’s diary that she ran away from home to go to art school, and by trying to touch her credit card we learn that she’s almost out of money. She dodges her douchey neighbor, Zack, and a very aggressive sales pitch from the computer terminal in the hallway. She also picks up a lost ring from her landlady, Fiona, who is actually pretty nice. Outside, she passes a homeless (?) psychic (?) wizard (?) named Cortez who tells her that she has to face her destiny or else her nightmares will continue. He clearly means well, but this understandably freaks the hell out of April, so she splits.
April arrives at the Venice Academy of the Visual Arts, the extremely prestigious art school she hopes to attend if all goes well with her upcoming student exhibition. Her friend Emma shows up and starts chatting with her, and at this point it’s becoming clear that every character in this game is way better than April.
This incident scares April enough that she decides maybe she should take Cortez’s prophetic warnings a little more seriously. She enlists the help of her friend Charlie, who works at the cafe, to track him down. April’s face would turn into a black hole every time she said any of her dialogue in this scene, which I thought was pretty cool.
In order to take the subway to get to Cortez, April has to get money from her boss. In order to get the money, she has to give him her time sheet. I spent a very long time wandering around clicking on things and fiddling with unrelated puzzles before I discovered that the timesheet was tucked into the diary that was already in her inventory. I did get the water heater in the apartment building working, though! I also got some bread from this thing in the cafe that I thought was a bloomin’ onion and then threw it at a seagull outside my bedroom window. Somehow this landed me with a clothesline and a rubber ducky. All of this felt like the opposite of intuitive but it did let me solve a puzzle in the subway later on which was nice.
END OF CHAPTER 1 !!!
Chapter Two: Through the Looking-Glass
The game skips straight to the next morning, with an April who is now pretty desperate for Cortez’s help. Our diary tells us that everyone else in the cafe saw the little rat guy, too... and talking to Fiona downstairs reveals that she and her girlfriend, Mickey, saw another, different vision in the lobby of the building last night, which means that these mysterious breaks in reality aren’t limited just to April. Even worse, it looks like April’s gonna have to talk to her gross neighbor, Zack, to find out where Cortez is hiding. Yuck!!!!!!! She ends up promising to go on a date with him in exchange for information, which is pretty much the textbook definition of a bad idea, but it moves the story forward at least.
April goes looking for Cortez at the Mercury theater, which is outside of the Venice neighborhood in an area that looks a lot grimier and more cyberpunk. The janitor tells her, somewhat unconvincingly, that he doesn’t know who Cortez is, and that the theater is closed. Getting in requires putting a fedora on top of some trash bags, activating a wind-up toy monkey, and setting some newspaper on fire, in typical convoluted point-and-click style.
Fortunately, Cortez is right inside. After a brief conversation, he takes April back into the alley and opens a portal in the wall. “You’re about to take the first step on the longest journey of your life,” he warns. (Hey, that’s the name of the game!)
April steps through the portal and falls through into a room with a robed priest. He seems pretty unsurprised by her sudden appearance in his temple, and it sounds like he’s familiar with Cortez. His name is Vestrum Tobias Grensret. He leads April outside and sets her loose to wander, saying she can come back in and talk once she’s done. Welcome to the second of our game’s two worlds: the fantasy reality, Arcadia. More specifically, the northern city of Marcuria.
Okay, cool. So, first up, there’s a vendor with a bird in a cage. “It’s a sorry looking bird,” says April, out loud. “Hey what the hell lady” says the bird (or something to that effect). The bird can talk! April really needs to learn to subvocalize. And she should probably put some different clothes on while she’s at it.
The vendor wants us to play a game of cups in order to free this bird but April is a lot more concerned with learning about Arcadia so she wastes his time with a lot of questions first. Apparently this vendor hates the priests, hates his neighbor, hates his bird, and doesn’t think Dolmari women should legally be allowed to gamble because he thinks they’re psychic (which they are not). I don’t have any money to offer for cups so I try to bet my gold ring. Apparently, gold is extremely commonplace in Arcadia, and all of the money is made with ACTUALLY rare metals, like iron. Fiction sure is wacky!
For now, I try my luck with the ornery map merchant, who has been stationed across from the cups man for 6 years and has never said a word except to insult him. This man doesn’t sell any maps of Marcuria because the Guild of Tourism has exclusive publishing rights to maps of the city, but I can’t go to the Guild of Tourism because they’re closed for the holidays. I sure am learning a lot! Let’s see if I can find some money. Maybe the Vestrum has some?
Ages ago, there was only one Earth, where science and magic existed side by side in harmony. Through their combined powers, mankind learned how to do god power level magic, which threatened the Balance of the Cosmos and invited Chaos. (Chaos was the black goo that threatened April during the dream sequence in the prologue.)
A race of aliens called the Draic-Kin (dragons) who are responsible for maintaining the Balance on different worlds came out of hiding to help us. There were four of them on Earth altogether. One of these four founded the Sentinel, a group of six scientists and six magicians who were tasked with separating and guarding the soon-to-be-two worlds: Stark, the world of science, and Arcadia, the world of magic. Also, two of the dragons went to Stark, and two went to Arcadia.
When the two worlds were split apart, the tower was separated into its own area, which is called the Realm of the Guardian, and which exists between reality and dreams. Also, the disc got messed up, and if the Realm of the Guardian is ever under threat—or if the two worlds need to be reunited—then someone needs to get four pieces of a key, which were given to the Sentinel in Arcadia, and also the precious stones belonging to each of the four dragons. So that’s a total of eight items that would need to be collected, if, hypothetically, some kind of Balance-destroying threat were to start, I don’t know, teleporting rat men through jukeboxes into cyberpunk cafés.
The only way for most members of either world to get to the other is through dreams: all residents of Stark dream in Arcadia, and all residents of Arcadia dream in Stark. However, some people are Shifters, with the ability to travel between the worlds. April Ryan is a Shifter. Carlos is NOT a shifter; he just channeled April’s power to open a portal, and would not have been able to step through it himself if he had tried.
Also, sounds like the Guardian has gone missing, and it’s our job to track down the new one before the Vanguard can get their grubby little mitts on ‘em. Stupid inconvenient heritable magic!!!!!
And after all of this, I still haven’t found a coin! Although a new dialogue tree gets me a job as a delivery boy for the map salesman, so I’ll probably be raking in the dough in no time flat.
Okay, so I'm zero coins and one flute richer, but check it out: this guy, Brian Westhouse, is from Stark! He's not a shifter, but got to Marcuria from 1930s America via a brief, 300-year detour in the land between the two worlds. Now he's a grouchy alcoholic with none of his former taste for adventure. He's excited enough to see April that he gives her a pocket watch which, when combined with a pushpin in her inventory, can be used to help her shift back to Stark. Hooray! Now maybe Cortez can answer a few questions. It sounds like Brian Westhouse knew him, but wouldn’t that make him over 300 years old??
At the very least, he’ll answer some questions about our quest. In case it wasn’t clear from context clues, Chaos is building in the two worlds, and the Divide is being breached. That’s what caused all the visions people saw last night, bleeding across realities. April, as a Shifter, is the only person who can possibly save the Balance, but only with Cortez’s help. We have four tasks: finding the Guardian, finding the gateway to their realm, getting the key (the disc and jewels), and defeating the Vanguard. Sounds like several hours of gameplay, to say the least! I, for one, am excited. April’s less enthused, but I control her, so she’s gonna have to put up with it.
But all of that can wait until tomorrow. For now, April needs to go talk to her friends! (Actually, my April wandered around aimlessly for several minutes before stumbling across her friends, but since no changes to the environment were made during that time we can make the choice to decanonize that.)
Charlie flirts with April, and she seems surprised despite literally everyone else constantly telling her that he likes her. There’s a concert happening in the café in less than an hour and it’s apparently a big deal. Emma comes in and joins April at the couch and reminds her that she promised Zack a date (oops) and encourages her to ditch him because he’s a creep. You’re given a choice here but my April agrees with Emma. Fuck that guy, I don’t owe him shit. He’s gross!!
Of course, the fact that Zack lives literal feet from my front door might present a problem for my safety. I’m sure it’ll be fine…
Chapter Three: Friends and Enemies
April wakes up the next morning with a horrible headache, which she reasonably attributes more to her cross-dimensional voyage than to the one or two drinks she had last night. But she can’t sleep in: she has to go to Hope Street, the most dangerous neighborhood in Newport, to talk to a priest Cortez told her about! Chop chop, April!
We make it to Hope Street, a neighborhood you can tell is dangerous because there are two thugs holding steel pipes and menacing some guy and a lady sitting down with a conspicuous green cloth tied around her arm. Classy! April makes it to the cathedral completely unscathed, though. Turns out the sequel to the Bible came out five years ago? I can’t tell if that was a joke or not. Anyway…
The priest helps direct us to a boy named Warren Hughes (no relation) who Cortez asked us to track down. He’s a member of a gang called the Razorblades. April finds Warren pretty quickly, but before he’ll give her any useful information he wants her to break into the Newport Police Department database and delete his criminal record and then pull any information on his family so that he can find out where his sister is. Awesome, sounds so easy. Super duper easy no problem. So April travels to the police station and BREAKING NEWS!!!!!!
Okay, so there’s a shuttle crash site right outside of the police station. Good to know. There’s a fully intact antigravity unit attached to the shuttle, but it’s behind a barrier and the supervising cop isn’t accepting any of April’s attempts to distract him. We’ll have to come back for that later.
Also, the doors to the station aren’t working, which means the only things getting in and out of police HQ are cops, prisoners, and trash. You know what that means…
In the police station are some criminals, a grumpy cop at the desk, two repairmen on their lunch break and an old video phone (video is so passé!). There's an optional dialogue with the phone in which April calls home and speaks with her mother, which is very sweet and also pretty sad. Immediately after this loving, heartfelt moment April terrorizes the two repairmen in an attempt to get them to fix the door to the station and eventually resolves to forge a legal document claiming that there's an emergency and therefore union rules can be ignored. Hooray, moral high ground!
Once the repairmen working on the entrance to the archives, April uses deception and harassment to get everyone's back turned toward the doors, then slips through into the corridor beyond. Immediately and rationally she buys some Bingo! soda from the Bingo! soda vending machine. Bingo! is the only brand of soda available on the market after the devastating soda wars of 2159, a one-off joke in this game that is actually a carefully maintained point of continuity across the entire franchise going forward. The only way to get into the archives themselves is with the use of a retinal scanner, so April can't get in just yet. Instead, she heads down the hall into a bathroom, where she is greeted by a series of mildly concerning grunting noises eminating from somewhere off screen.
There's a dot matrix printer in the archives, which is a pretty good gag. Also, Warren's sister's name is Erika, which is fucked up because my mom's name is Erica Hughes. I'm freaking out, man. April is able to get the necessary information on Warren and his sister using Detective Minelli's login information, but the instant she starts trying to dig up dirt on the Vanguard (and the Church of Voltec, the organization name they pose under in Stark), the computer returns a warning that Minelli's transgression has been logged and he must report to his supervisor. However, a code appears on screen which she's able to use to procure a file on the Vanguard, inside of which is a tiny datacube. April grabs this, as well as the dot-matrix evidence of her tampering, and skedaddles. Warren takes the documents and directs her to his friend, Burns Flipper, at the Newport docks.
April gives the Flipper her datacube, an action which is both preceded and immediately followed by a large amount of harassment of more or less every possible nature, and I spend most of the scene wanting to reach my hand through the screen and throttle him. Turns out the datacube contains a distinctly fascist-looking propoganda video by the Church of Voltec. Turns out the publicly peace-loving religion is actually distinctly evil, and they're building a clone army to take over the world. Yipes!
Also, we learn that the Church of Voltec/the Vanguard is in control of MTI, one of the biggest corporate enterprises in Stark. Yet more bad news! This means it's not going to be possible to infiltrate HQ without an extremely fancy ID, which April can't afford. But she has an in: Flipper will trade April a fake ID for a high-quality antigrav control unit. Now, why does that sound familiar...?
Of course, since this is a video game, April can't just get the ID now; she'll have to come back for it in a couple of days. [/rolls eyes.] For now, though, there's a bunch of info we can give to Cortez, once we're able to track him down. And we are (eventually): he's in the cathedral, gossiping about us with the priest! April hides behind a pillar and eavesdrops. Turns out the priest knows about the Balance, and Cortez is deliberately keeping us in the dark about some very scary and potentially very important information in order to make sure we stay on his side. Maybe April can't trust him as much as she initially thought! She steps out from behind the pillar, pretending she didn't hear anything, and gives him the intel that she got... but now she knows to be on guard around this mysterious Mr. Cortez. They arrange to meet up tomorrow evening and go their separate ways.
What April doesn't know, and the player does, is that Cortez is arrested by the Vanguard that night.
Back at the Border House, Zack is standing outside of April's door, looking suspicious. He runs away the instant she calls out to him. Charlie and Emma are inside of her apartment. There are multiple dialogue options here, but my April decides to finally come clean, and Charlie and Emma promise to help her.
Outro
And, yeah, that's what I've played so far.
I realize this is not much! There are obviously still seven more chapters' worth of game to play. But the virtual machine I was using to run Windows to play the game BRICKED ITSELF (very cool) with a known bug that has NO SIGN OF BEING RESOLVED ANYTIME SOON (epic) and I haven't gotten around to resolving that issue yet. BUT once I do get it fixed I will pick this game back up immediately, and also play and review some other old PC games, so stay tuned! In the meantime I'm developing some methods to play some old console games, and I have several that I'm very excited to give a try. That's all for now! Ta-ta! 😎😎😎