The Longest Journey
Review of an ancient game. It's roughly coeval with Planescape: Torment, and it's available on Steam for the price of not much beer.
The presentation, it's not amazing. The graphics, they burn, of course; the music's OK, and some of the voice acting is amazing (and some is pants). The worst VA in the game is the protagonist, who clearly doesn't get many of her lines, and this doesn't help.
But the story - written by the same guy who did much of the writing for The Secret World MMO - is really worth staying for. It holds together well, it's mostly well put together, paced and told. There are a couple of dei ex machina and a bit where a lampshade is hung on a bit of plot that was clearly cut for time, but it all does seem to fit. The gameplay gets in the way in places - I resorted to a walkthrough approximately once every hour or so of gameplay, for example where the trail that leads to opening a fusebox next to a movie theatre starts by half-inching some fresh bread from your workplace - and I think the story is at its best when it's being Fortean rather than fantastical, but I have a soft spot for new-and-interesting cyberpunk implementations and the only thing that really dates the cyberpunk is that the protagonist doesn't have a smartphone.
And this is a feminist game. It doesn't make this explicit, it doesn't make a big deal of it, the protagonist isn't artificially faux-empowered nor is she artificially disempowered, and there is no artificial love interest (applause button). It's just a story about a person going and doing things, and that person happens to be a woman. And it makes you-the-player identify with her, care about her problems, see the world through her eyes, way before she encounters what's actually some pretty run-of-the-mill sexism. And it doesn't turn around and make a big thing of it, it just makes you get patronised, belittled and have to fend off grabby jerks for no reason other than being female. Okay, maybe I shouldn't make such a big thing of it, but to me it is a big thing. It makes the story better for being there, it's not jumped up and down on, it's just a world element, and there should be more games that do this.
So in short, the style has suffered but the substance isn't too damn bad at all, and if you haven't played this and are looking for a point-and-click adventure game with a decent story, you'll be well served. Also it's got a 2006 sequel, and it's almost worth sitting through the horrible graphics of the original just to see many of the same places again with a shiny new look, and it's very worth playing them in quick succession to get the most out of the story of the second (which I've just started).
The presentation, it's not amazing. The graphics, they burn, of course; the music's OK, and some of the voice acting is amazing (and some is pants). The worst VA in the game is the protagonist, who clearly doesn't get many of her lines, and this doesn't help.
But the story - written by the same guy who did much of the writing for The Secret World MMO - is really worth staying for. It holds together well, it's mostly well put together, paced and told. There are a couple of dei ex machina and a bit where a lampshade is hung on a bit of plot that was clearly cut for time, but it all does seem to fit. The gameplay gets in the way in places - I resorted to a walkthrough approximately once every hour or so of gameplay, for example where the trail that leads to opening a fusebox next to a movie theatre starts by half-inching some fresh bread from your workplace - and I think the story is at its best when it's being Fortean rather than fantastical, but I have a soft spot for new-and-interesting cyberpunk implementations and the only thing that really dates the cyberpunk is that the protagonist doesn't have a smartphone.
And this is a feminist game. It doesn't make this explicit, it doesn't make a big deal of it, the protagonist isn't artificially faux-empowered nor is she artificially disempowered, and there is no artificial love interest (applause button). It's just a story about a person going and doing things, and that person happens to be a woman. And it makes you-the-player identify with her, care about her problems, see the world through her eyes, way before she encounters what's actually some pretty run-of-the-mill sexism. And it doesn't turn around and make a big thing of it, it just makes you get patronised, belittled and have to fend off grabby jerks for no reason other than being female. Okay, maybe I shouldn't make such a big thing of it, but to me it is a big thing. It makes the story better for being there, it's not jumped up and down on, it's just a world element, and there should be more games that do this.
So in short, the style has suffered but the substance isn't too damn bad at all, and if you haven't played this and are looking for a point-and-click adventure game with a decent story, you'll be well served. Also it's got a 2006 sequel, and it's almost worth sitting through the horrible graphics of the original just to see many of the same places again with a shiny new look, and it's very worth playing them in quick succession to get the most out of the story of the second (which I've just started).