Review: Dreamfall Chapters- Reborn

Way back in 2002, a young and braces clad 19 year old me discovered a little game called The Longest Journey. It was a classic point-and-click adventure game created in 1999 and it remains to date one of my favourite games of all time. Not only was it an amazingly written fantasy, but I also played it at a time when I was very much in the same position as 18 year old protagonist April Ryan: just setting out on her own, attending university for the first time, making new friends, discovering new adventures, feeling a bit lost in many ways. I was sad when it ended, but deeply satisfied that I got to play it.

Look at the pretty!

Seven years after it was made, Dreamfall came out as a sequel and I eagerly shoved my way to the front of the line to get my copy. Like its predecessor, I easily got engrossed in the story and related to the issues the characters were going through. And again, I was sad to see it end (especially since it was on a massive cliffhanger) and wondered if the next sequel would even get made. Ragnar Tornquist, creator of the games, assured everyone that this time around it would not take seven years to make a sequel.

Seven years later…after much development hell and giving up hope that I would ever get a conclusion to my favourite story, we finally have that sequel. And of course, as with almost all big adventure games these days, we have Kickstarter to thank for it.

I tell you these stories not to bore you but to give you an idea of just how much I have been anticipating Dreamfall Chapters. Which is a lot. Like…a really big lot and that I will be reviewing this as someone who is a huge fan of the previous games. So…be ye warned…biases and minor spoilers of the previous games might ensue.

SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t played either the Longest Journey or Dreamfall, it is recommended you do so. Red Thread provides a recap of the major events of Dreamfall, but it’s fairly brief. Spoilers of the previous games will be discussed here.

Dreamfall Chapters: Reborn is the first in a series of episodic games and serves mostly as an introduction to the new plot and a quick catch-up with the previous games’ protagonists. Taking place one year after the events of the last game, we find ourselves once again with Zoe Castillo, the young woman capable of entering dreams who ended up in a coma while saving the world, and Kian, the fanatic apostle turned rebel traitor who has been in prison since.

He at least has been working out while in prison.

While we spend a bit of time with Kian and his escape from prison, the majority of the game is actually spent with Zoe. After a brief prologue in which we witness the funeral of April Ryan (sniff), we see Zoe trapped in the dreamworld and helping lost souls who have succumbed to the addictive Dream Machine that she had attempted to eliminate in the previous game. Soon though, Zoe must make the decision to wake up from her coma and travel back to the land of the living. Unfortunately, she seems to have lost most of her memories of both the events leading up to her coma and her time in the dreamworld, including the fact that it was her own mother who put her there in an attempt to cover up a massive conspiracy.

Three months later, Zoe has now moved to Europolis, a far cry from sunny, pleasant Casablanca of Dreamfall. This is about as urban jungle as urban jungle can get. Smog and bad weather block out the sun. Rent for even a shoebox apartment is at a premium. Concrete and food carts dominate every space. Oddly enough, she has gotten back together with her boyfriend, Reza, whom had gone missing during the events of Dreamfall. All is not well in Zoe’s world. Her relationship is on the rocks and there is political unrest in the rainy city. Not only that, but Zoe has been struggling to regain her memories.

That is a lot to unpack for what amounts to about two hours of gameplay. There is a lot of catching up to do with old characters and a lot of foundation to lay for the new adventure to come. But Red Thread Games for the most part handles it deftly. One of their core strengths has always been creating rich and complex worlds, and Dreamfall Chapters continues that tradition, introducing new elements such as Europolis and the political machine it runs on and building on old elements introduced in the previous games. I have to admit that I squealed a little upon seeing an advertisement for Bingo Cola and a Crow Boy map guide.

Better than that are the characters and dialogue, which not only sound natural but can be incredibly witty. Zoe makes a good sarcastic straight man to many of the more colourful characters. Kian gets a refreshing injection of personality compared to the last game. But the star of the show for me personally had to be Shitbot, the old, useless robot Zoe is tasked to train. I did not think I could laugh so much at a simple fetch quest, but finding things for the little bot to do ended up being the highlight for the entire game for me and probably the most quotable as well. Fair warning though: as evidenced above, the language in the game can get pretty colourful. If you are someone who is easily offended by swearing or name calling, you might want to think before picking up that controller.

Especially these two.

Not as good are, alas, some performance issues mostly pertaining to graphics. Since playing the game, there have been a couple of patches which have come out which will hopefully fix most issues but that didn’t stop my Europolis from looking like a polygon nightmare no matter what graphic setting I set it on. It was, unfortunately, pretty distracting and took me out of the experience which is a shame because otherwise Dreamfall Chapters is absolutely gorgeous when it’s working. I have also heard complaints of the character animations, but personally they look fine to me (other than a terrifying baby) and we have to realize that even with Kickstarter, there is only so far a budget will go.

Dreamfall Chapters plays much like Dreamfall. For the time being, they seem to have done away with the stealth and combat systems which I am not so secretly thankful for (if they MUST be put into later episodes…please please please let it be less tear inducing). Most puzzles are inventory or dialogue puzzles, in which you must get information to move forward. There was only one that I found myself banging my head on my desk which involved trying to figure out where I could possibly get a gift to give to a prominent city official, but otherwise they were intuitive and made sense to the environment.

If there was one thing in the gameplay that could be improved upon though, it was the map system. There is a reason I love mini-maps in my games. If you get lost you can pull them up. Anytime. And then be on your way. You would think this would make sense in a world that has what looks like Google glasses, but instead to access a map of the city you actually have to go find a “Crowboy” to tell you where to go, much like a mall map. This turned out to be incredibly frustrating for someone who lacks a sense of direction like myself and had to attempt to memorize the path that Crowboy was telling me to go on in a city which I was not even remotely familiar with. Eventually I managed to get the layout of the city down in my head, but it was a long road to get there.

This time around, Red Thread seems to have adopted Telltale’s model of game design, not just in its choice to release it in episodes, but also to implement a choice system. There are key points within the game in which you will be presented with a moral decision to make. This could be something as small as “What should I bring my boyfriend for lunch” and as intense as “Should I stop that mob gang from beating up my friend?”. As of yet, the outcome of these decisions has yet to be determined so I can’t really comment on how much of an impact I have. Oh, except perhaps for a choice made near the beginning which actually will determine which job Zoe will have in the remainder of the game. It’s almost a shame, since this means that many players will be left without the glory that is Shitbot.

Seriously, this little guy brought me so much laughter.

Unlike Telltale however, this is Red Thread’s first foray into the world of episodic gaming, and unfortunately it shows a little. Telltale are masters of episodic pacing at this point. The good folks at Red Thread are used to making wonderfully paced full length games, but seem to have fallen a little short when it comes to the pacing of Dreamfall Chapters. This isn’t necessarily a game breaking thing. Like I said, the company is still very much experimenting and learning. The choice to split Chapters into different episodes was one that was made later in the process as well. As a result, the first chapter feels…abrupt…

The best way that I can describe it is to use Doctor Who as an example. When I watch new episodes of Doctor Who, I often watch it streamed on Space. Doctor Who, which is normally on the BBC, was never meant to have commercials. But we Canadians can’t seem to live without them, and so what ends up happening is a random ad being shoved into random points in the episode. It never really makes sense, it breaks up the pacing and the episode ends up suffering as a result. That’s sort of what Dreamfall Chapters feels like: cut off at an odd point.

But even with the pacing issues, it can’t be denied that Dreamfall’s story is one to look forward to. From the opening sequence right until the intriguing conclusion, I was on high excitement the entire play. While some might complain of the short game time (although I think that’s more from them being used to playing full games more than anything), I think there are worse issues to have with your game than thinking “I wish there was more”. There are some mysterious seeds planted and I for one cannot wait to see how it all plays out. If you like a good old fashioned sci-fi/fantasy story, check out The Longest Journey…then Dreamfall…then Dreamfall Chapters…from what I can see, it promises to be one fantastical journey.