Dreamfall - Chapter 5. Had this sitting around for 2 years, but never installed it due to stupidity with my new computer. Finally decided to sit down and play this as god intended - high resolution on a powerful PC on a widescreen with a PS2 controller hooked up via USB. Nice graphics, non-existent load times.
General opinion: Pretty good! As advertised, the adventure-gamey solve the puzzle elements are much much reduced, but I'm okay with that. Most are pretty simple, or are fast logic and self-contained logic puzzles. The game is more an interactive movie with snappy dialogue and a good plot, and I'm totally there. Some reviews apparently criticized the combat for being simplistic, but it's *fun*, and provides a good light diversion to the exploration and chatting. (Some of the interaction in the game is "try and BS this person by picking your way through a conversation tree, fall back to beating them up if you fail to bluff 'em right." More satisfying than the adventure-game version of "you MUST chat them up right and all conversation options lead to success / request for some puzzle to be solved.) On the downside, the stealth elements... were mostly easy early on, but I got to the first aggravating section of them. "Oh look bad guy is taking a boat across the underground river! Perhaps I can follow him by going into these random catacombs with blue-creatures guarding them, and I can go solve silly puzzles!" See, if I could just beat them all up with some staff-fu and then solve the nonsensical yet easy puzzle at my leisure, it'd be fine, but you seemingly can't, so you're stuck playing Bad Metal Gear Solid with Shifter Raven running from the unkillable monsters until they quiet down. Yeah I ruthlessly FAQed the puzzle here, it's not worth trying to solve while dodging guards, and it had nothing to do with the plot in any way.
I will say that the plot comes at an interesting time. I played the original The Longest Journey in college ~9 years ago, when Our Heroine April Ryan was a college student. The sequel takes place 10 years later where the gang has grown up and gotten jobs, much like me. (Though of course the main new perspective character is ~18, but there are 3 perspective characters a la Suiko3, so.) I also have to wonder if the people designing the game like horror (SPOILERS, though not huge ones). "Oh, look, an excuse to go back and visit Newport from the first game! Oh. Even the cool, artsy, collegey part of town has become a depraved slum, and the boarding house from the first game is now a Silent Hill style nightmare of brick and bare furnishings. Only mattresses adorn the rooms, and the people living here are subject to cruel medical experiments and are drugged up." ....Yeah.
Anyway: Go play the original The Longest Journey if you haven't already even if you don't like adventure games (FAQ it, though it's not nearly as cruel as most), then play Dreamfall. It's probably in the 10 dollar bin by now, and it's a good story so far.
