The Longest Journey is a point-and-click adventure game, developed by the Norwegian studio Funcom and first released in 1999.
It’s story centers on April Ryan, an art student in the American city of Newport, a fictional city in the 23rd century. It is a high-tech corporate-run Cyberpunk world. April has some strange experiences, which leads her to discover that this is actually only one half of the world. Many millennia ago, the world was split between the forces of science and magic to keep humanity from descending into chaos. It created a world of science and technology named Stark and a world of magic named Arcadia. Arcadia is a medieval fantasy world. A force called the balance keeps the two worlds in order, but it is breaking down, under threat from a group called the vanguard that wants to tear down the division. April has the rare ability to shift between the two worlds, and it is her task to restore the balance.
This story has its twists and turns, but it is actually quite simple at heart. It is a standard fantasy story of the hero who has to fulfil the prophecies, defeat the forces of evil and save the world. There are some suggestions, particularly at the end, that this good vs. evil story is not all there is to this world, but this game at least doesn’t really explore it.
What makes this story work and not come across as superficial is the excellent character and dialogue writing and worldbuilding. The characters are so distinctly written and memorable. The game has plenty of humour but there is also serious substance to the characters and world. Ragnar Tørnquist was the writer of this game, and it is a work of art.
The game does take time to develop its world and plot in a truly extensive manner. The Longest Journey might be named after a Dag Hammarskjöld quote, but it also lives up to its title by being an unusually long game, especially by adventure game standards. I reckon it took me around 16-18 hours to play, about twice the length of most adventure games. And the writing actually is able to support a game of its size.
April herself is foremost among the game’s great characters. She is a great protagonist. She is a quirky and snarky young adult whose kindness, bravery and intelligence leads her to become a saviour of the two worlds. She is loveable and funny in a way that makes an ideal companion for the player to explore the world of The Longest Journey.
The supporting characters are similarly well-written. Perhaps the chief joy of the game is that they help April and are helped by her in return in ways that endear you to them and make the relationships quite touching. The friendship between April and her sidekick the talking bird Crow is perhaps the highlight, but the people she meets on the steps of her journey are all great. You have a constant sense of meeting and helping well-developed characters and even cultures on your journey in a way that makes playing The Longest Journeyquite fulfilling.
The dialogues in this game are admittedly often very long, this is one of the talkiest adventure games ever made. And there are entire characters who have almost zero to do with the plot you can have long conversations with. Yet the dialogues are so well-written, creating distinctive characters and making the world feel alive.
It helps that the voice acting in the english version is excellent. Practically all the voices are great, butspecial praise must go to Sarah Hamilton as April. April is in the game the whole way through, having things to say about everything you can click on and long dialogues with just about every character, and this is a long game. She therefore has an unusually large amount of dialogue compared to not just other video game characters but perhaps even fiction in general.And Hamilton’s performance is excellent all the way through this long and difficult role, hitting all the different emotional registers April goes through.
In large due to the excellent character writing, the worlds in this game feel believable. They are also well-written and developed in other ways. Stark is based on the cyberpunk’s genre critical depiction of a world of high technology turned to the sinister ends ofcapitalism and big corporations. The Longest Journeytakes up and continues that criticism with its sharp satire of technological capitalism. This satire still rings true. A very early-game highlight is the computer in the hallway in Alice’s boarding house that tries to get you to buy voice control for it when it already has voice control installed, but “only for sales purposes”. This satire takes a darker turn later in the game. There is depiction of severe class differences and poverty, with people ending up having to sell themselves into virtual slavery on space colonies. The villains fittingly are in Stark organized into a complex mix of new age religion and multinational corporation.
Yet Stark feels real in a way that many Cyberpunk dystopias don’t. It helps that it is not fully a dystopia, there is still happiness in the world even if you are not part of the rich elite. You start the game in a small but not pod-sized apartment, and there are still parks and art schools and cafés around. It doesn’t feel tonally inconsistent with the rest of Stark and Newport, it feels like a natural continuation of our world where there are both areas of misery and relative happiness, even when you are not rich.
Arcadia is no less well-developed. You get to explore Arcadia quite thoroughly, not just encountering different characters but different cultures as well. There are a race of earthdiggers, one who experiences past, present and future simultaneously, stick people, merpeople and flying lizard people. April is a curious and tolerant person, who is able to listen to and understand different perspectives and become a part of all these different cultures. It is very rewarding world to explore that feels very alive. The player gets to develop a close connection to most of these cultures, even exploring their stories and myths. It develops into a theme of tolerance and understanding between different cultures, and an important goal is to create peace between two different people at war, that were once one people.
The art really helps in making the game’s world feel so interesting. Graphically the game is 3d sprites moving across 2d environments. The 3d sprites are admittedly not good at all. The character design is okay but the execution in the actual game engine looks just ugly and is awkwardly animated.
The 2d backgrounds, however, are still impressive and look just gorgeous to look at. The detailed and well-executed art helps to make the world feel so immersive. The music is relatively sparse, but quite effective and haunting.
Today, there are also technical issues that comes with running the game on modern systems. The GOG version doesn’t run that well. but amazingly SCUMMVM supports it and makes it run like a charm, in widescreen too.
The point-and-click gameplay is flawed but actually quite good. The logic of what you have to do mostly makes sense and the challenges feel satisfying to solve. There are only about 3-5 really hard or complicated puzzles, and I would only name one as truly illogical (the infamous rubber ducky puzzle). There is some pixel hunting nonsense, you can press X to bring up symbols that highlights all exits on the screen but nothing similar exists for ordinary interactable objects. But it is not that bad, what you need to find is usually easy to find if you are dilligent in your exploring. It helps that this game is Lucasarts-style (the game actually references Guybrush Threepwood) in the sense you can’t die or end up with a dead end. Of course that means scenes where you are supposed to be under direct physical threat from another character end up being not threatening at all, but that’s a worthy trade for not punishing the player with death.
The great writing also helps motivate the gameplay, the characters and environment are so likeable that you you want to explore and help people. This is what makes The Longest Journeysuch a great adventure game, one of the best of its kind.
