Dreamfall Chapters Review - Bedtime Story
Dreamfall Chapters is the sequel to 2006’s Dreamfall: The Longest Journey which was a story-based adventure game, similar to the more recent titles by Telltale, with a particular focus on characters and world building. Chapters takes place shortly after the events of the first game, but, in our world, 8 years have passed. Is this story worth continuing, or did it miss its window?
As I mentioned, Dreamfall Chapters begins shortly after the events of the first game. There’s a basic recap of the predecessor to bring you up to speed on the events, the characters and their motivations and why things are the way they are. Unfortunately, as someone who didn’t play the first game, I found this introduction lacking in detail and it didn’t really help me figure out what was going on. All I understood is that an evil corporation owns dream machines which the entire population uses for entertainment but, in reality, the evil corporation wants to harvest the dream for evil purposes. I still had a lot of questions unanswered and, whilst some I was able to figure out the more I played, I still never felt like I was fully up to speed on the storyline.
Without spoiling anything, Dreamfall Chapters has you playing three different characters throughout the course of the game. You’ll spend the majority of the game with Zoe, a girl who just wakes up from a coma and attempts to continue her quest to stop the evil corporation whilst fixing her own personal issues from before the accident. The other playable characters, Kian and April, have smaller sections reserved to them which lack any real substance. April’s seems like a real missed opportunity, especially since she is the most interesting character, but her part is far too short and ends just when things just start to get good. Overall, Kian’s part is both short and fairly boring, and easily the most forgettable of the three.
As I briefly mentioned at the beginning, Dreamfall Chapters plays similarly to Telltale’s The Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us, except you control your character in a third person perspective like you would in a typical action game. Since the majority of the game plays like a point-and-click, however, this perspective can make the controls feel a little inaccurate and generally feel clunky. Luckily, the game is very slow paced so, even if the controls aren’t perfect, they rarely get in the way. When you aren’t walking around looking and interacting with objects, you’ll be talking to all sorts of interesting and mysterious characters. Most conversations have several dialogue options, and characters remember your choices and opinions which affect the outcome of the story. So far, in this first “Book”, only a few choices seemed to have major plot-changing decision whereas the rest seemed there mostly for the purpose of background noise throughout the levels.
It’s fair to say that, even for a point-and-click story-based game, Dreamfall Chapters is slow. Conversations are long and, if you aren’t familiar with the events of the previous game, often vague and confusing. Even the puzzles, which are basic and very straight forward, take a long time because of how clunky and slow the whole process and interface are. Most chapters last between 30 minutes and an hour, but it really feels like they only offer 15 minutes of actual content whereas the rest is just padding or you trying to wrestle with the interface to get the game to do what you want.
There isn’t much else to say about Dreamfall Chapters; in short, it’s a point-and-click adventure game which will task you to solve puzzles and make tough moral choices. People who have played the previous game know exactly what to expect. The game, however, suffers from a number of noticeable flaws: the controls and interface, as mentioned, feel clunky and unintuitive, while the pace at which the story moves and event happens may be too slow for some.
Presentation-wise, Dreamfall Chapters looks average; environments and characters both look fine at a distance but, as you look closer, there are plenty of flat textures and a number of visual glitches and bugs which take away from the world Red Thread Games tried so hard to build. Regardless of all that, the biggest issue with the game is how problematic it is for newcomers to get into the plot. For a game which is based entirely on story and characters, the summary at the beginning of the game doesn’t do Dreamfall justice and, despite the developer’s best efforts, I always felt like I was missing something as I played the game.
If you haven’t played the first installment, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, then Chapters probably won’t be the best place to start off with. Whilst returning fans will find something to like here, Dreamfall Chapters still comes as a cautious recommendation.