The workings of fate and the overlap between Dreamfall's several worlds fade into the background - Zoe's tasks for the day involve buying lunch from a food stall, visiting her boyfriend and checking in at work, where she will test out the abilities of a confused machine not-so-affectionately known as Shitbot. From lingering at the fringes of bodily existence, she becomes vital again, with no memory of her grander purpose. Zoe is in a new place, attempting to kindle the sparks of an old relationship, and without any fanfare Dreamfall Chapters becomes a story about beginnings rather than endings. Something strange happens when the pace slows. The scale of what is happening, particularly in the opening scenes, is vast - world-ending, myth-shattering, fate-fiddling stuff - and it's only when the story settles into Zoe's new life in Europolis that we zoom in and get a read on the purely personal rather than the preternatural level. The game is attractive - although I sense the bite of the budget or the edges of the engine in the depiction of certain events, particularly a jailbreak in which rioting is kept conspicuously off-screen - and the script is strong.Īnyone going in cold, without knowledge of the previous games, might be slightly baffled, even though there is an attempt to ease into the story. Minor additions aside, I didn't play anything in Book One that I hadn't already seen. Europolis, the neon hub of marketing and militant police that you'll spend the majority of this first episode exploring, is more heavily populated and some scenes have been altered to improve the flow of the story, or to provide pointers where objectives weren't entirely clear. It's around five hours long and I've written about most of the content already, although there have been some additions and tweaks since the preview build I played. The Chapters are now divided into Books and yesterday saw the release of the first. The Longest Journey began a decade and a half ago and Dreamfall Chapters marks the end of that journey.īut not yet.
Parting is such sweet sorrow and all that, but it's beneficial to have some closure.
When you spend so long hoping for the continuation and conclusion of a story that was part of your earlier life, it's a bittersweet relief to hear that the waiting is finally over.
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