User Reviews

This game is a true gem -- gorgeous graphics, extremely engaging and entrancing story. The puzzles are not too difficult, but are fun and fit well into the story. I'd encourage EVERYONE to play this game -- yeah, I'm talking to YOU! There's philosophy and humor, excitement and mystery, and most of all -- well, ADVENTURE. It's fun. It's interesting. You'll love it.

I always like playing a good adventure game, and this one is absolutely among the top three ones ever made according to me and a lot of others.. This game is really the top of the cream and will be for a long time because there hasn't been any game like this before..at least not as good.

The sad thing though, is that it hasn't been really integrated and didn't have a chance to be. But if You ever liked ANY adventure game, play this.

Undisputably the best adventure game I've ever played.

Right from the start you are drawn into the adventure like a moth to a light - your alter-ego April Ryan has an intriguing, wondrous dream that sets the pace for everything to come.

Stark and Arcadia, the worlds you will travel through in the course of the game, are beautiful and memorable in every way. Stark portrays the world as we know it perfectly, while in Arcadia is a mystical right out of fairy-tales - so amazing yet believable.

You will come to both know and love April Ryan as she discovers her role in the Balance and interacts with both friend and foe. In fact, all the characters in the game are well-developed and add a sense of depth lacking in so many games today. The diary she keeps is attractively written, lending colour to her life as it subtly guides you into her thoughts about her past, present and future.

As for the technical aspects, the background art is simply breathtaking. Every scene is lovingly rendered and brought to life. Although the 3D models themselves are a bit lacking, you will still be wowed at the lip-synching. The voice acting is just as good as any animated film, with Sarah Hamilton doing an impeccable job as the lovable heroine. The soundtrack is awe-inspiring - if only they sold it separately!

As far as i can see there are no drawbacks to this game. I'm running out of adjectives so here's the bottom line -

If you have given up on adventure games you obviously haven't played The Longest Journey yet. If you like adventure games, this is a must-buy. If you don't like adventure games, you'll become a fan once you've played this through!

I just finished The Longest Journey, and if your looking for Video Game of the Year look somewhere else! This is Video Game of the Decade! Everything from the Music, Graphics, Characters, to Story is Excellent. The main character April Ryan, played by Sarah Hamilton, is the key to 'the balance' between two worlds. You will be emerged in a different time and world playing this astonishing game from FUNCOM. It's no wonder that it is a best seller around the world. Go check it out!

This game is proof that games, like movies and books, can be considered works of art. The characters are amazing. Each and every one of them seems real. There are so many of them. They are all unique. The settings are so imaginative. The story is compelling. I've never played a game where I really cared about what was happening, until I played this. Played is too unflattering of a word. Experienced would be better. The voice acting is incredible. It's an epic game. The Wizard of Oz of games. The game has been around for over a year now. It should be available really cheap. I highly recommend tracking it down. You won't be sorry.

If this game had been released a little earlier in the United States it most likely would have faired better, but by the year 2000 the 3D graphics were quite dated.

That said, this game was one of my most memorable gaming experiences, right up there with the first time I played Zork, Myst, and Half Life.

The puzzles are mostly logic based, and while some require inventory items that can be a little non-logical to come by, it didn't takeaway from the experience, but rather enhanced it for the most part.

The Longest Journey is a cross between a traditional point-and-click adventure game and a computer-animated novel. Story, character and environment are much more important than you'd expect, and it's here that most of the innovation is to be found - the puzzles are quite old-fashioned and occasionally a bit silly, and the technology doesn't push any envelopes.

Ragnar Tornquist's script, though, is hugely ambitious, and mostly successful; it has a superb premise - essentially a pair of worlds, one futuristic, the other a place of post-Tolkeinish fantasy, and with a heroine (April Ryan) who finds herself shifting, at first unwillingly, between the two. There are some problems - a few too many genre clichés, and the script is needlessly verbose in places where less would have been more. Most of the vocal performances are excellent, however, especially from the lead characters, and visually the design, especially of the environments through which April moves, is superbly evocative. This gives TLJ a narrative range and emotional resonance that's very rarely found in games - if you have the patience to operate at its meditative pace. Even if there'll never be a mass market for this kind of thing, I hope it is another step along the way to the development of the computer game as a genuine art form.

Above and beyond the great writing is this amazing soundtrack that I'm still listening to 20 years on

Where to start? The Longest Journey is a Journey released in 1999 by Norwegian game developer Funcom, it's the first entry into The Dreamfall trilogy.

The game is a single player point-and-click adventure game with a STRONG emphasis on storytelling and character development and it still holds up extremely well 20 years after its release

The game doesn't run well on modern systems so you will have to use patches to improve performance

that being said this is an exceptional game and I recommend it to anyone that enjoys games with good stories

The only regret about this game is that I have played it recently after all these years.This game has very unique artistic touch.You can feel the spirit and the work given to this piece of art on each detail.Games back then succeeded in both keeping the pace serious and the humor sense intact. They also managed to give some references from classical writers,books and even fairy tales.What I mostly enjoyed was the philosophical,metaphysical and spiritual background of the game.It was not just doing the job for just sake of doing it, not ; it is a process of believing in whole story, it completeness and presenting in most mesmerizing way.This game had everything in it ;cognitive dissonance states describing sociological and psychological states of characters as well as their choices (free will).Astral projections could not be done as perfectly as was presented in this game , it was just a perfect fit. This a progressive game which requires patience at the start but as it develops and story goes the gameplay experience enhances.

Hey, this game is great! Nice graphics, great sound, good puzzles, etc. The only thing that I did not like that much was, that you sometimes have to move through up to 3 screens without any contents. Well, there are nice graphics but nothing that would do anything. They don't even contain red herrings : But this game was still lot's of fun!

First-rate, outstanding, amazing storytelling & dialogs. What i dislike. 1.There were some plot inconsistencies as for me, mostly about languages they speak between races. (Well it's forgivable in the world of magic. And what a wonderful world!) 2.April is sometimes stupid and i didn't really like her as much as Zoe from sequel. 3.Resolution is obsolete (640x480?) even for 2000. 4.People you talk to are usually too forgetful. One example. Just half-a-minute ago the receptionist said i should disappear 'cause i'm not allowed in here, now he really believes April's a pizza-girl and lets me in... Strange. Then what i like. Well i like everything else. This is really a different story. No stupid narnias. I've found some references to World War II here. Dialogs are superb. Voices are perfect. Design is all well done. Sound is involving. Gameplay is non-active, but thanks to the story very interesting. I could run Journey all day long. We have the great ability of "skipping time" here. If you don't want to waste your precious time or fall asleep upon watching your April getting from one side of screen to another you just press escape several times and she gets where she's going in a few (real-time) seconds. This is one of my favorite fantasy worlds & stories: Ragnar Tornquist's world is inferior only to J.R.R. Tolkien's. And surely one of my favorite adventure games behind Grim Fandango (of course) and (i really love TLJ's sequel) Dreamfall: The Longest Journey.

The Longest Journey attempts to return to the roots of the adventure game genre and does manage to do a half-decent job. The game's story combines elements of science fiction and fantasy to create its own interesting universe but one still heavily reliant on a number of clichés. The main characters are alright but not stellar by any means.

The game uses 3D character models against pre-rendered backgrounds. The models are alright if low-poly and the backgrounds are rather stunning. However the combination of the two is not seamless or even very clean for that matter. Also some of the character animations are just lacking in any kind of depth. On the whole I hated the pre-rendered cut-scenes which in my view were just plain ugly.

Audio wise the game was very competent, the voice-cast is nice and memorable. The soundtrack was appropriate but not particularly great.

One of the most annoying aspects of this game are the insane amounts of dialogue that one has to bare. If this wasn't bad enough much of the dialogue doesn't really have to do with anything relevant so skipping a piece here and there undoubtedly will not hinder your gaming experience to a great degree. The main character also doesn't say anything relevant for much of the games. Running to a walkthrough is hardly uncommon with adventure-games but thanks to the utter lack of information in the game itself, this tends to happen with Longest Journey a lot more than it should.

Additionally the skip-feature is also annoying since it not only skips actions but dialogue as well and the feature should have been implemented a lot better.

In all, The Longest Journey is not a stand-out game in the genre. It's an okay adventure with a fairly good plot, but has enough irks to make me not want to even bother with the sequel.

The Longest Journey is LONG, make no mistake about it. This game's strength is in its story, not in its play. The puzzles are predictable to seasoned players. Playing this game is more like reading a book, or watching a play. Dialogues are lengthy. Excellent continuity from beginning to end. The voice talent and direction are excellent! I can't say enough about it. The character Flipper Burns had me crying with laughter. (Warning: coarse language) I'd love to see or hear these actors in other works. The outtakes were a nice treat too. The look/feel/playability is similar to point-and-click games from Sierra-Online, such as the Kings Quest series. No arcade sequences. The rich story and character voices are what puts this game at the top of its class.

TLJ really raised the bar for the QUALITY of adventure games. This game adds nothing new in terms of gameplay or even cinematics. It's still a point-and-click fest and use-the-weird-object-with-the-other-weird-object-to-make-a-tool-so-you-can-m ove-on extravaganza, but at least you don't have to go pixel-hunting. Spread over 4 discs, TLJ offers twice as much playtime as the standard graphic adventure.

This is a European title, so I don't know what differences in dialogue, etc. were made before the two English audio versions were made, but the American cast seemed above par for computer voice acting. This has been the third best cast I have heard in a game after Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father and The Curse of Monkey Island, two of the greatest games ever made.

The story does taper off towards the end, and sadly, like most games in this genre, the ending feels tacked on. If they had a few less cinematics near the end, they might have been able to improve the ending. However, as it stands, this has been the last good adventure game to come out since Monkey Island 3.

Twas the Spring of 2001. I'd not played an Adventure game since 1995's Phantasmagoria, and I'd had enough walking around, clicking on items, solving obscure nonsensical puzzles to last me a lifetime. It was fun while it lasted, but good bye Adventure games. Good riddance. Have a nice life, and don't call me.

By chance (or was it fate?) I ran across a friend playing The Longest Journey. A quick glance at the interface revealed the genre and immediately turned my interest away … and then April Ryan, the protagonist, spoke, "Storm clouds. Even the weather sucks in my dreams. I feel so charmed." Whoa, a cynical smart ass heroine? Okay, okay, April. You have my attention. Let's see what you got.

I began TLJ just to ride along with Ms Ryan so I could listen to her commentary (delivered with style and flair by Sarah Hamilton), but she was just the hook. And soon she drew me into a classical story arc supported by quirky colorful (not to mention frickin' hilarious) characters, environments that provide their own sly social commentaries on our world, and the Adventure game's knack for, um, "creative" uses of the mundane.

The Longest Journey spans two parallel worlds, one of a magic and one of science – a clever device used to bring the realms of science fiction and fantasy together in a single game. April discovers that she is a "shifter", possessing the ability to cross between worlds to embark on the titular journey. Yes, it's the age old tale of a protagonist who, guided by a mentor, is destined for glory. Predictable and overused as this formula may be, I can't help but marvel at the power it still wields when done right.

In Stark, the sci-fi half of the game, April encounters scenery reminiscent of Blade Runner (Metro Circle), a car alarm that informs her "I've just been charged with a *bleep* load of electricity – touch me again, and you're toast!" She gets trapped in a bureaucratic hell of Union rules, mundane paperwork, and secretaries who don't want to deal with her … and yes, she accurately voices our frustration (in an appropriate vocabulary, to boot!). Eventually, the conflict will lead her from her humble beginnings as an art student into a conspiracy involving a megacorporation aiming for world domination. After all, it wouldn't be an epic without an empire in there somewhere, now would it?

Over in Arcadia, the fantasy half of the game, our heroine encounters a scene right out of Hanzel and Gretel, the Venar who exist in all moments of their life simultaneously giving their speech serious grammatical problems regarding proper tense, stickmen who want to follow the cow over the moon, and, of course, an evil Wizard. And every single one of these memorable characters can go toe to toe with April's wit. Facing Roper Klacks, the powerful Wizard (Alchemist, whatever), April, utterly powerless against him, remarks, "Oh yeah? Uh, I can pull a rabbit out of a hat!" Klacks answers, "I can pull a hat out of a rabbit. What's your point?"

Even throwaway characters like the map's merchant makes his mark, giving April the most convoluted directions imaginable like something out of a Monty Python skit.

No review of TLJ would be complete without dedicating a paragraph to the greatest VG sidekick of all time: Crow, the talking bird (a real lady's man, er, bird) who shoots his beak off faster than his small brain can keep up with, which in turn gives us a character who is paradoxically savvy and naïve at the same time (voiced to perfection by Roger Raines.) "We can't help them!" Crow protests, "They're savages! They eat birds!" April informs, "Crow, I eat birds. You probably do too." "Yeah, I do love roast duck in a tangy … okay, I see your point."

Both worlds are deliciously tongue-in-cheek, but not outright goofy. Rather, the humor builds a common foundation – dare I say camaraderie? – between April and the gamer (particularly towards the first half of the game.) But pay attention as the story progresses, watch as the narrative subtly drifts to a more somber tone, and observe how much more deeply these later moments resonate. This allows the game to remain an intimate tale despite its epic scope. April's path, she is told, leads through both greatness and tragedy, and as we journey with April, we learn the price destiny requires her to pay … and we almost don't want her to make that sacrifice. She doesn't deserve this fate. Because we've laughed with her, we'll want to cry for her.

I've mentioned the great voice work by Sarah Hamilton and Roger Raines, but believe me it doesn't stop there. The quality of the voicework is unprecedented, and the consistency phenomenal – Ralph Byers as the eccentric Roper Klacks and the drunk Bryan Westhouse, Andrew Donnelly as crazy genius "the Flipper", Jeff Meller as the Maps Merchant and Abnaxus of the Venar to name a few. To date, The Longest Journey hands down has the best voice acting of any game I've ever played.

If I had to level a complaint against TLJ, I would have to say the prerendered movies leave something to be desired. While the in game graphics and character models are fine – the prerendered backgrounds, stunning in their design and execution (not to mention full of life with little touches such as animated water, characters moving about, signs blinking, and cars zooming by) – the prerendered movies, land in uncanny valley territory (especially in regards to the characters.) Close, but not quite.

I guess I could complain about some of the illogical puzzles, but I knew that was coming from the get go – this is an adventure game, after all. However, April Ryan's feminine charms and no BS attitude made up for the genre's inherent frustrations. Hail to the Queen, baby.