The Longest Journey: Could be shorter

Recently, I’ve played The Longest Journey by the Norwegian Studio Funcom. It is not to be confused with it’s very different sequel Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The Game Designer responsible is Ragnar Tørnquist and I found out that he was about my age when he began working on the game, which is always quite a shock. The game is supposed to be one of the milestones in the recent development of adventure games. It was praised in almost every source I found and according to many reviews it is one of the best adventures of all time.





The Longest Journey is considered a game especially suitable for women. Even though the main character looks a bit slutty, I must agree.

The game has some extraordinary aspects and I would like to address them. However, if this it the best adventure of all time then the genre has yet many problems to solve.

It is a classic third-person click & point adventure. You see one static screen at a time and your character inside it. You control your character by clicking on various objects. You can pick up things, there is an inventory, you can look at things, use things and talk to people. The story is about April Ryan, a young arts student in the future, who visits a fantasy world in her dreams. With time, she discovers that there is a deeper meaning behind her dreams and the plot goes mildly Fahrenheit.

The Longer-Than-Necessary Journey

One thing that immediately stroke me when playing the game was how incredibly LONG things take. I mean LONG. April moves so incredibly slowly through the environment that you have to wait up to a minute until she even crosses a screen. There are over 150 screens. It was not until the third chapter or so that discovered that I could make her run by double-clicking on things. Even then, I found myself on screens, which took over 30 seconds to cross even when running. This seems like a banal complaint but it is a serious flaw. The adventure genre is about exploring environments and trying out different things. If movement trough the environment takes so long, players will get discouraged experimenting. They won’t risk spending another few minutes going from one location to another unless they are absolutely sure. It also should be obvious that the movement in point & click adventures is quite non-interactive and not very fun.

The are various solutions:

• Make the environment dense. If there are longs stretches of non-interactive environment, you might be doing something wrong. I agree that non-interactive passages can enhance the mood (like the long ladder in Snake Eater) but not when we are talking about routes the players will take several times.
• Make characters move faster. I mean really fast. Why not even teleporting? Cut to the chase. The Longest Journey has some teleporting but in order to get to a place you can teleport off you usually have to walk a bunch of screens, which makes it rather pointless.
• Make movement interactive. If you have to add long routes, at least give the players something to do. In action games, you don’t have this problem since players are in direct control of the character and the movement is completely interactive. I guess that wouldn’t work in point & click adventures because the whole idea here is the indirect control. But what about Doom III-like audiologs where players can listen to dialogue while they move through the environment, for example?

The problem with The Longest Journey is that it doesn’t stop there. Not only the walking takes so long, also interaction with other characters is very tedious. The first real conversation you have in the game spans no less then 17 different topics and it takes 12 minutes to listen to all of it. That is half of a “The Simpsons” episode and that is just one conversation. There are several reasons for this madness. First of all, at least some of the German voices (I’ve played the game in German, it might be different in other languages) overdid it and really took their time to pronounce their lines. This can be very classy if you have maybe three lines of text, but not in a game like this. Another reason is that the Funcom decided to introduce some character animations, which apparently were made by the same guy, who did the walking animation. If you talk to a sailor character, he has to take out his pipe before he can even say “hello” to you. This animation takes 16 seconds alone. And it happens every time you talk to him. The record was an animation of about 50 seconds. It happens when you as a librarian about a book. He slowly walks to a shelf and fetches the book for you. The animation is non-interactive, you can’t do anything else while it is happening and the voice is also interrupted while the animation is running. Just just have to wait for a minute doing NOTHING.





Just imagine watching this screen for 12 minutes while people are talking in the background. And you have to click once about every minute.

But the most significant reason for the long conversation is simply the writer’s philosophy. It has become a bitter cliché: in almost every game, your main character begins suffering from amnesia and every other person in the world has to explain to him again how the word works. This isn’t a story cliché, it is actually the image story writers have from the players: they understand players as empty vessels just waiting to be passively filled with info. The more info you provide, the better “writing” the game has. So as a player you spend your time bluntly asking everybody “Can you tell me about X?” or “Y? Never heard of it”. I must say that although there are some nice dialogs in The Longest Journey, I have come to hate this kind of writing. It is boring, stupid, patronizing and non-interactive. If you start questioning the amnesia philosophy, you will find out that you don’t have to explain things, that people can figure out a lot by themselves, that they become more emotionally engaged in the process and on top of that, you will save money because you dialogue is shorter. A good example for a radical departure from this philosophy is Myst – a game that offers almost NO clue about what is going on, leaving the player thirsty for info and burning up with desire to find out what is going on. By the way, this also exactly how J.J. Abram’s “Mystery Box” approach works.

Another problem with the amnesia philosophy is that things have the tendency to go from bad to abysmal. The game designers realize that there is just no way to shovel that much content into the players the way they envisioned and start introducing features like in-game books where players are supposed to read whole segments of the background story. Because this is done as a quick fix, it always is a disaster. The example in The Longest Journey is a particularly horrible one. There are 6 books or so, each one several pages long. Not only you have to wait 50 second for each book because of the animation, they are all written in completely illegible, pixelated, italic font. At this point, I just gave it up reading. If they didn’t care enough, why should I?





This image has not been scaled. I couldn’t decipher that mess, even if I wanted to. If you don’ understand German – trust me, it makes no difference.

Quality Goes, Quantity Stays

In his DVD, Michel Gondry (Who failed to answer on his nomination for the Cologne Thumper – asshole) mentioned a very nice observation. Without being able to quote him directly, he said something among the lines of “On this DVD, I concentrated on quantity because quality goes, quantity stays”. It would be difficult to find a game, which illustrates the point better then The Longest Journey. When it came out in 1999 it was praised for excellent graphics. Today, if the reviews didn’t feature screenshots, I would be sure they are talking about the wrong game. The game is just hideous. I never saw characters so ugly. They look all like badly-lit potato zombies. I would understand if it was just in-game – there is just so much you can do in low-poly. However, even the pre-rendered sequences are just horrible. The animations are so bad, I wouldn’t even call them animations, they rather resemble slow-motion spastic seisures. It will remain a mystery how there might have been a time where this was considered “stunning”. On the bright side, the environments are not as bad as the characters. In fact, they still look good. In the end, it makes you wonder just exactly what people will criticize about today’s game graphics ten years from now.





Gamespot, 1999: “The character models [...] are good-looking and diverse.” Me, 2008: “GAAAAHH!! Go away ugly potato zombie!!”

The other part of the quote, “quantity stays” also applies to The Longest Journey. No matter how bad the characters look, the game offers just SO MUCH content, it deserves kudos just because of that. In the game, you visit a futuristic metropolis, a fantasy city, a magic forest, a flying castle, you go on a ship, you dive to an underwater city, you get stranded on an island, you go into space – it is overwhelming. While the character graphics fail to impress, the sheer amount of content still does and probably always will.

A game for women?

The Longest Journey is often called a game for women. I was skeptical at first, especially if you consider the slutty outfit of the main character. However, as you get into the story, you will soon realize little differences, which probably make the game more attractive to the female audience. April Ryan is an arts student. She lives in a charming low-cost student’s apartment. The campus and her apparent are situated in a city quarter called “Venice” which a small, quiet neighborhood with an industrial historic background. There are canals, there is a little café, a park, houses with lovely paintings on the walls. April’s life revolves around paying the rent, working at the café as a waitress, preparing on a piece of art for an exhibition, going into concerts and clubs and chatting with her best friend about music bands and guys. I can completely understand how this is more interesting then a CRAZY GAME ABOUT PIRATES or A CARTOON DOG WITH A CARTOON BUNNY SOLVING WACKY CRIMES, especially from a perspective of a young female player. The good thing about The Longest Journey is that it is not pink ware. It is not gender-exclusive and being a student myself, I found the setting very familiar and heartwarming.





Venice is a charming, liberal part of the town. Living in Cologne’s Südstadt, I almost felt home. There are even crazy bums bugging you.

Although she looks slutty, April is a strong female character. As a typical adventure game character, she has witty remarks to various topics. She is no super hero, she is just a young student after all but she manages all the problems she encounters all by herself and she is not afraid to kick some butt in the process. Refreshingly, there is no male character for her to swoon over, she isn’t rescued by a “hero” at any point in the game. Well, ok there is this one scene where a guy helps out but that guy is 60, so he is rather a mentor figure then a “hero”.

The story has a fantasy component and I have enjoyed it because it successfully avoids the general fantasy clichés. There are no knights and no sword fights, no orks elves and gobblins – none of that typical Lord of the Ring Zoo. The fantasy world has a certain medieval style to it but it is generally refreshing and quite original. Because it is less violent and focuses more on wonder and mystery, it works well with the Charmed / Buffy part of the female audience. And again, it is not gender-exclusive: guys like Buffy too, you know.

And then there are even some more intriguing details. You landlord is a lesbian. Not the Britney & Madonna pseudo-lesbian made for men to drool over. She’s no aggressive dyke either. She is just lesbian and totally and completely comfortable with it. There is also a police officer who repels April’s attempt to infatuate him by simply stating “I’m sorry, I’m gay”. This police officer is no gay cliché. He isn’t talking with a funny voice, he isn’t moving funny. He is a respectable policeman who just happens to be gay. The Longest Journey might be the first game where gay characters are portrayed in a serious and mature fashion.

Needs more duct tape

So my general impression is that the game has some very interesting aspects. It has a somewhat unique setting, avoids clichés and delivers A LOT of content.

But the last strong point is the problem at the same time. As I have already mentioned, nobody is able to handle that much content yet. In a TV series, an individual episode can have very nice, consistent dramaturgy. If you look at the story across a whole season, you will realize obvious plot-holes and inconsistencies. The audience doesn’t realize because they too have a hard time to keep track of all the things that happen in a whole season. The recent trend of watching TV Series on DVDs exposes the weaknesses of long stories. The same goes for The Longest Journey. What strikes me every time in these kind of games is how the story completely falls apart at the end. The studio runs out of money and patience, the designers realize that the haven’t thought things trough, parts of the game get cut and rewritten. The Longest Journey, you find out at the very end that “the chosen one” is some random guy whom you met in just one scene. I had a hard time figuring out who that even was. Yet the other characters act as if they knew him very well so it is obvious that the writers completely failed to establish for the player who that character is – possibly because of major cuts or because of rewritten script. Also, the puzzles get noticeably easier at the end while the cut scenes get more frequent. A clear sign that the team just wants to get over with it.

So I’m left with contradictory feelings. There are obvious gameplay flaws like the slow movement, amnesia philosophy, Fahrenheit syndrome and fatally invisible causality (giving a cipher to a hacker for decoding results a random guy in a different part of the town to order a piece of pizza – what?!). If a game considered to be the best adventures games still has those basic flaws, the genre has still ways to go.

Because the strong parts of the game are the mundane college scenes, I would again recommend: more of less. Cut the fantasy crap to a minimum, focus on the simple facts, polish the gameplay, make a short, meaningful story with replay value. On the other hand, there is something awe-inspiring having just the sheer amount of content, especially if it is peppered with cool details like the lack of fantasy chlichés or mature gay characters. So in the end, I’ll probably settle down on the following: it could be shorter.