THE LONGEST JOURNEY

                 Reviewed by Stefan Herber

Months went by and no adventure games of any description were
released. Then this offering from I suspect a Scandinavian
developer appeared and was the best selling title for 3 weeks at
the internet site where I buy most of my software. It didn't
however do anything in the national charts so sadly there hasn't
been a rush of competitors. BUT - is it worth seeking out?

Truth to tell I started to play it months ago but it took back
seat to me replaying Baldur's Gate prior to starting the sequel.
When I had to abandon that thanks to a snapped CD I decided to go
back to it while awaiting a replacement. That tells it all - it's
really not very compelling although this does improve as one gets
further into the game.

The lead character is a Lara Croft lookalike who is slightly less
well endowed although almost as miraculous when it comes to her
powers of deduction and persuasion. She's an arts student sometime
in the future where (you guessed it) the USA is run by a number of
corrupt multinational businesses. This young lady starts to
hallucinate about a parallel world and then finds herself caught
in the scheme of things where she has to save not only the world
as the programmers imagine it but the parallel world as well from
chaos. It might have been nice to see what people imagined as
worse than what they were already living in but you can't have
everything.

The puzzles vary from the glaringly obvious to ones which would
have made the writers of Myst embarrassed. There are very few of
the latter - largely due to the fact that your inventory is never
very large - but one fairly early in the game really had me foxed
for a good while. They only get easier later though.

No arcade; no sudden death sequences; mouse driven; reasonable
graphics; a fairly strong if ultimately ridiculous story - why
can't I be more positive. The problem is the dialogue -
conversations go on and on and on. I never timed any but I suspect
there are occasions when you can spend 20 minutes doing nothing
but talk to a certain character. Most of this provides nothing but
of course the question you don't bother to ask is the vital bit of
info you need to proceed. I discovered this to my chagrin in one
episode where it is not only important to talk to everyone but
also if you do it in the wrong sequence you get irredeemably
stuck. That only happened once fortunately.

So in the end it's OK. Say 6/10?










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