The best adventure game in years. That's one of the easier ways to describe The Longest Journey. It's also the longest, the most rewarding and the most mature.
It's got great graphics, superb dialogue, and unforgettable characters, but the genre-bending story will keep graphic adventure fans glued to the screen.
This is not a game. It is a masterpiece of digital art. Incredible story + fun + great game dynamics + not so bad graphics. Probably this game changed my perspective for point & click adventures. A must try for everyone.
An engrossing and highly entertaining adventure game with characters that you can care about, an involving storyline to keep you hooked, and settings and characters that are both beautiful and bizarre.
End of 2021. I got a decent hardware: RTX 2070 and Ryzen 5 3600 and I played this game without any additional HD mods or whatever exists out there, it was a raw experience. I thing this might be one of my favorite games. You can just feel the effort and love that went into it and I'm really, really grateful for this game. I don't know if this is a relevant information but I just wanted to note that I'm 20 so it's not some kind of nostalgia because my parents weren't even planning on having me when this game came out. So yeah, I want to say "Thank you" to the developers and the whole staff. I'm especially grateful for the voice acting team that did an amazing job and made the whole world feel more alive. Again, thank you.
Хорошая игра. Не шедевр, как многие говорят, но история мне понравилась. Проблема разве что в нелогичных головоломках и парочке затянутых моментов, ну и концовка маленько разочаровала.
I never really liked this game as much as everyone else did. Yes it does have an interesting - though not terribly original - story and at least some of the characters are also interesting. Especially April is excellent. Also, the backgrounds are quite nice to look at and the ending is especially good (and completely unexpected).
But this is were the good stuff ends. The puzzles in this game are downright terrible. Arguably the worst in any adventure game and I am not only referring to the now infamous inflatable ducky puzzle. Puzzles require leaps of logic and can mostly really only be solved through trial and error. Also, so often you really have no idea what you should be doing or that there is a puzzle there in the first place. It gets slightly better as the game progresses, but not much really.
Then there is the length. The Longest Journey is indeed Long! Too long!! Mostly because the story is extremely stretched-out. Moreover, everything in this game is slow: the character animations are slow, the walking is slow and much of the speaking is slow as well. This, combined with the puzzles, makes the game just a chore to play.
Finally there is the character models. Boy do they look HIDEOUS! Both in-game as well as in the cut-scenes characters look like drugged-out alien zombies. April herself is actually the worst offender. She even looks bad on the box art. Cannot imagine how somebody thought this was acceptable, even back in 1999.
So there you have it. While this review may sound overly negative I would still recommend this game, but only for it's story - and for the sequel(s) that follow it.
This game has a lot of good reviews, so I was curious about it. Nonetheless some magazines gave this game only average scores. And I also think, that The longest journey is only a good game, but not a masterpiece.
First of all the atmosphere, the settings in a fantasy and sci-fi world and the story are top. Even today I could get into the world very easily and I was curious to find out more. I guess this is why many people like this game so much, but they ignore some big weaknesses of the game:
It is hard to implement an interesting and complex gameplay in a point and click adventure and this game has the same problems. Some puzzles were even frustrating and a walkthrough is necessary. I am surely not the only one. And yes, sometimes this game feels like an interactive book, not a game.
In addition you need to go back to known places so often, what is a big and annoying timesink. Another annoying timesink is the amount of text you need to read. It is so ridiculous, way too much, they could write the dialogues more tight and we could save a lot of time. In addition the dialogues were so naive, boring and stupid. This was the biggest motivation killer and the main reason, why I stopped to play it before the end.
I need to mention also, that I couldnt fix the resolution, so it was only 640x480. In addition I couldnt implement any widescreen fix. In all other old and famous games I could change and raise the resolution. There are even more technical problems, look at the TLJ pcgamingwiki site. There are much better old adventure games outside (Zack McCracken, Manias Mansion, Monkey Island and so on), play them instead.