The Longest Journey

The Longest Journey arrived on PC at the turn of the millennium as one of the last great classic adventure games before the genre stepped back for several years. The main heroine is April Ryan, a student at an art school in the city of Newport, which comes across as an ordinary near future full of levitating vending machines, corporate towers, and grimy districts on the edge of town. April starts having dreams that spill over into reality, and she gradually discovers she can cross between two parallel worlds: the technological Stark and the magical Arcadia. The balance between them is collapsing, and she is one of the few people who can do anything about it.

The game is controlled with a classic point-and-click interface with a small set of actions and an inventory, but it puts storytelling front and center. The dialogue is extensive and branching, side characters have their own backstories, and the player often just talks to them because it's interesting, not for another item. Most of the puzzles grow out of the situation and the logic of that world's rules, although a few of them are still remembered today as needlessly convoluted. Technically it used pre-rendered two-dimensional backgrounds combined with three-dimensional characters, which on the Windows PCs of the day allowed for very detailed artwork without requiring a 3D accelerator, though at the cost of a game that spanned several discs.

The atmosphere rests on the contrast between the cold, urban Stark and the colorful, at times almost fairy-tale-like Arcadia, each with its own music and narrative pace. The voice acting was unusually extensive for its time, and April ranks among the best-written game heroines of the nineties: ironic, uncertain, and never coming across as a mere plot device. Critics praised especially the story and its length, which for most players ran to dozens of hours. The game quickly earned cult status, got a sequel in Dreamfall, and is still recommended today as a showcase of what adventure games can achieve when they don't try to be just a collection of puzzles.