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The Longest Journey

3D adventure game reviewed

Saving April Ryan

Every now and then a game comes along that sucks you into its world so completely that you vanish into it for days at a time, surfacing only for food and sleep when you just physically can't play any longer. Last year we had Outcast to rob us of sleep and social life, and this year we have The Longest Journey.

Produced somewhere in the depths of Scandinavia, and only reaching our God forsaken shores some months after it had been released across most of the rest of Europe, The Longest Journey is quite simply one of the slickest and most involving adventure games I've ever had the joy of playing.

You take on the role of April Ryan, an art student in 23rd century America who finds herself caught up in an epic struggle of good and evil that spans two worlds - her own scientific world of Stark, and the magical realm of Arcadia.

April has the ability to "shift" between these two worlds, and before long you find yourself travelling backwards and forwards between them as you try to solve the puzzle of who and what you are, while at the same time trying to save the world from imminent destruction at the hands of a pseudo-religious group known as the Vanguard.

The plot is told through a mixture of in-game conversations and beautiful rendered cinematics that are amongst the best I've seen. Although at times the info-dumping can get a bit much, and the conversations are occasionally a little long winded, the strong characters and excellent story drag you on through the game's four CDs.

Sound And Vision

The first thing to strike you on starting the game is just how beautiful it is. The pre-rendered backdrops are simply stunning, ranging from the city-scape and slums of Stark to the forests, islands and medieval cities of Arcadia.

In total there are over 150 locations to explore, and 50 characters to speak to, from cops and engineers to talking birds and eccentric alchemists. The characters are real-time 3D models, and most of them are nicely detailed and well animated.

Unfortunately the game is locked into a low resolution of just 640x480, which can make the characters look rather blocky at times against the stunning backgrounds, and causes some nasty "jaggies". If you have a Voodoo 5 or GeForce 2 graphics card you are in for a treat though - full-scene anti-aliasing really does give this game a whole new lease of life.

The sound is equally good, with some excellent voice acting and atmospheric music that suits the game and its mood perfectly. The script manages to keep you involved in the game and its characters, as well as injecting a welcome dose of humour, although some people may find the frequent swearing from some of the characters a little over the top. Make no mistake, this is not a kid's game...

Of course, one of the most important elements of any good adventure game is its puzzles, and luckily The Longest Journey scores well here as well.

The puzzles are fairly challenging at times, but most of them are logical enough if you stop to think things through. There are a few bizarre puzzles which had me scrambling for the walkthrough though, and it's not always entirely obvious what you should be doing.

Luckily the game includes April's Diary, which is invaluable when you get stuck. This includes entries about many of the key events that take place during the game, which give you a further insight into April's character and, on a more practical level, can often give you a pointer as to what to do next.

You also have access to a log of all her conversations throughout the game, and trawling through the transcripts of her recent conversations sometimes turns up clues that you missed when listening to them the first time round.

Interfacing

Controlling the game is achieved with your mouse, using a very simple left and right click interface that allows you to move around, examine or pick-up items, talk to characters, and combine items in your inventory, all within a couple of mouse clicks.

Talking to another character brings up a series of options at the bottom of your screen, although as with most adventure games, at the end of the day you usually end up going through most or all of the options anyway in one order or another.

You can also access April's Diary by moving the mouse to the top of the screen and clicking on the little diary icon that appears. This gives you access to save and load game options, game settings, conversation logs, and the diary itself of course.

It's all very intuitive and easy to use, and is very unobtrusive, leaving you to concentrate on April and the world she is exploring.

The Longest Journey is not without its flaws. The humour may not appeal to everyone, the conversations can be rather long and meandering at times, and the labyrinthine plot is occasionally hard to follow.

Also the 3D characters don't look as good as they should do because of the low resolution, and although the game still looks gorgeous and runs silky smooth even on my old RivaTNT, you will really need a graphics card with support for full-scene anti-aliasing to make the most of the game's visuals.

At the end of the day though, The Longest Journey is 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. What more could you want from an adventure game?

Eye Candy          

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The Longest Journey

• Screenshots

• 1999 ( Windows )
• 2014 ( iPhone )
• 2014 ( iPad )
• IQ Media Nordic AB
• Ubi Soft Entertainment Software
• Egmont Interactive GmbH
• R&P Electronic Media
• Empire Interactive Entertainment
• Funcom Oslo A/S
• FX Interactive, S.L.
• Empire Interactive Europe Ltd.
• Micro Application, S.A.
• Snowball.ru
• 1C-SoftClub
• Funcom N.V.
• #131 on Windows

Screenshots +

Credits (Windows version)

199 People (193 developers, 6 thanks) · View all

Average score: 88% (based on 52 ratings)

Average score: 4.2 out of 5 (based on 213 ratings with 17 reviews)

LONG, beautiful, but dated adventure game.

The Good The Longest Journey has beautiful visuals, a good soundtrack, and a decent plot. It's a good solid point-and-click adventure and one of the only good 3D adventure games out there. The Bad The game is dated. The character models are very pixelated when blown up on my widescreen 22'' monitor. The dialog can get very long and tedious. The puzzles can be frustratingly random and hard. April Ryan, the main character, is a sarcastic whiny teenager. The Bottom Line I would recommend this game to others if they enjoy adventure, but would hope that this game gets remade to the standards of it's sequel Dreamfall.

Windows · by hvrsd hvrsd (1) · 2007

Somewhat long and boring, but a fun game nonetheless.

The Good Adventure game fans rejoice! The genre isn't dead!

The Longest Journey certain is the "longest" journey I've played. badum-chink! Ahem.

The game is played through a point-and-click method with a pre-rendered background. Similar to Grim Fandango, in many ways, as well as a number of other adventure games dating back to Sierra's golden age in the early 90s, there's nothing so new to the interface that will leave anyone confused.

The graphics are beautiful, especially the pre-rendered backgrounds. There is amazing scenery throughout the game, from the beautiful areas in the near-future Venice to the colorful island with the snoring giant, to outer space, every part of the game you visit is eye candy. The character models aren't that bad, either.

The story I didn't care for - I'll explain why in the "bad" part - but the setting of the human world I love. It's a solid setting. It's in the near-future, with flying cars and other cliche'd sci-fi elements, but it's not so overly done to the point where it's not at all believable.

You'll fall in love with the characters in this game. My favorite part about the "adventure" game genre is that it's less of a game and more of an interactive movie. The characters in this game are all great, with great voice-acting and unique personalities. April, the talking crow, the sailor, the guy at the cafe, each character, those that had a large part and those that didn't, have a place in the story and I'll miss'em.

The game is four discs long, and it is a loooooong journey. Depending how much you like the game, you'll be spending a long time with it. The puzzles are pretty hard, and can take some work to solve.

The game is filled with lots of humor, and after you beat it you can access outtakes and other extras. THAT is a great thing, and more games should do that. The Bad Allright, the story is just dumb. The premise of the story - girl dreams of a world, finds out the world is real, goes and saves the universe - has been done before, but it's still a nice idea. Unfortunately, like far too many games of every genre, you can't progress anywhere in the story until you finish running errands for EVERYBODY. It's not the case in every part of the game. In fact, most of the things you do in the game have to do with the story - like placing the monkey in the garbage to fool the guard so you can sneak into the building or something - but there are way too many times when you have to get help from a certain character, but they won't help you until you do them a favor, which leads to another, and another, and another, and another until you've almost forgotten why you needed the guy's help in the first place.

Some of the puzzles aren't very practical at all. Also like most adventure games, every puzzle has but one sollution and there's no other way around it. It's up to you to solve the puzzle, but you can't do it in a practical way. Like, say, you have to fix a broken electrical wire in the subway. Call a technician? No, you have to use a rubber duck (this is actually a part of the game, though I can't remember exactly how it went about). How do you get the rubber duck? You throw gum out the window...maybe in the end, the idea works (use the rubber to ground the electricity or something), but who would ever think to do the things that get it done in the first place?!

At one point of the game, you have to hear a bunch of stories. Allright, now I'm fine with playing a long game that has a lot of different stories to be told, but I'm not up for sitting down and waiting for an hour while a bunch of bird-people tell me about their history. It's a vital part of the story to hear these stories, too.

The entire story of the game, while executed poorly, was good enough to get you by until the very end. Toward the end, the story just went "kaplooey" and left me pretty damned confused.

April is too ditsy to really be taken seriously. Ever. I wouldn't trust her to take care of my cat, let alone two universes.

The FMV cinematics are awful. The in-game characters looked more realistic than April did. In the cinematics, she looks like she has two black eyes and just got beat up. The animation doesn't seem as good as the in-game animation, either, which is pretty dumb. The FMV is there for dramatic effect, but with a little less effect and better animation, it could have been done in-game and produce the same thing.

There's a race in the game that doesn't live on the same "plane of time". Oh shut up. If it could tell the future, it would have been useful to tell me how I end up solving the damned puzzles. The Bottom Line Despite my ranting, as an adventure game it is fun. The story's kind of annoying, but the characters - especially the crow - are great. The graphics are wonderful and you'll spend hours and hours in this game. If you're an adventure fan, get it. If not, save yourself the aggrivation.

Windows · by kbmb (415) · 2002

Fan tribute to a dying genre

The Good When Longest Journey appeared on the stage, it generated a small sensation among adventure fans. Made by a Norwegian developer hitherto focused on console games, it was quickly proclaimed a modern masterpiece, and was frequently mentioned in speeches as argumentation against those who have condemned the genre to death. So, is it really that good? And, more importantly, can it save the adventure genre?

My opinion is that it is a nice game, but certainly not one that can compete with the classic offerings of Legend , Sierra , or LucasArts .

The game is firmly rooted in the existing traditions of adventure-making, most notably echoing the tendency of merging old-school inventory-based gameplay with serious settings and strong, emotionally charged plots rich in lore and characters. As everyone know, Gabriel Knight truly started that trend, and is rightly regarded as a milestone for that. Longest Journey was clearly influenced by that game, as well as perhaps the more recent Grim Fandango , which it resembles in overall structure and aspirations.

The journey is indeed long. The game has a linear story with rather frequent changes of locations; but each area is appropriately large, usually consisting of at least several interconnected screens you can explore. Longest Journey takes you to many interesting places, and it keeps up a good pacing, neither precipitating events and rushing towards the end, nor sticking too much to the same location. The game world is generously designed: there is a variety of indoor and outdoor locations, and most of them are interesting to visit. There are a dozen or so chapters, each focusing on a particular event or task needed to fulfill in either of the two worlds the game is set in. The considerable length of the plot reflects the game's premise of an epic adventure.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of the game is the new world it creates. The central idea of the story - the conflict between science and magic - may not be very original, but it is executed with love and attention to detail. The concept of allowing a normal, ordinary girl to catch a glimpse of a world she had no idea about, making her gradually unravel the truth about it and herself, works here just like it should. Like April Ryan, you discover a new world, surprised by everything you see. The larger part of the game is set in that "other" world, and the feeling of magical, wondrous exploration of the unknown is captured very well.

The developers weren't stingy with material: the game contains loads of information about the world, its history, its characters and concepts, and so on. It's true that the dialogues can get too dry and overly informative; but it is admirable that the designers wanted to cram as much lore as they could into them. In that way, Longest Journey is similar to role-playing games: its star is the universe itself rather than its characters or even concrete events constituting the game's story.

Longest Journey is a beautiful game. Most backgrounds are exquisitely detailed and ooze atmosphere. The Norse love of vast, majestic landscapes serving as potential battlegrounds for an upcoming confrontation between forces beyond our imagination is strongly manifested in this game. It is interesting to note that, although the nature in the game can hardly be called lush or exotic, some of the backgrounds convey an almost mystical, appropriately otherworldy feeling, mesmerizing in their somewhat cold beauty, reminding of pure and transcendental things lost to the futuristic world of soulless skyscrapers and high-speed transportation. The Bad The gameplay of Longest Journey is archaic. What's worse, it doesn't really fit the game's ambiance and story. Most puzzles are taken directly from classic comedy adventures of the past (most notably LucasArts' works) and are out of place in this seriously-minded and only mildly and very sporadically humorous game. Predominantly unrealistic and artificial, the game's puzzles involve sterile and awkward inventory item manipulations. They may not be as offensive as their infamous contemporary cat mustache , but they aren't as amusing as that one, either. Besides, this game doesn't have investigations, computer research, or other challenging activities besides inventory combinations and a few isolated logic puzzles.

Some of the inappropriately nonsensical, contrived tasks are at odds not only with the tone of the game, but also with the situations it puts the player in. For example, infiltrating a police station by means of a ridiculously labored concoction ruins the tension of the moment and the seriousness of the event. The game also has a few scenes where the heroine is in mortal danger; yet the ubiquitous "no death" policy turns them into unbecomingly serene affairs. Contrary to popular opinion, I don't think that LucasArtian device was the ultimate cure to the problems of adventure games. I believe that Sierra was on the right track creating potentially dangerous situations for the player instead of holding his hand all the time. This game, in particular, would have benefited from that design philosophy.

Much of the time here is spent on conversations with other characters. Unfortunately, they tend to drag quite a bit. Serving mostly as containers of background information necessary to understand the game's complex story, these dialogues can get very long-winded, often slowing down the game's tempo to a crawl. There are no close-ups on character faces during conversations, so you'll have to just read and occasionally click on a line to trigger the next batch, without having the feeling of really participating. The writing is good, but lacks personality and that extra treatment that made the classics of the past so inimitable. The Bottom Line Longest Journey is neither the savior of adventures, nor the innovative, groundbreaking game it so wanted to be. In fact, as an adventure game, it's just above average, falling short of the past greatness it passionately strives to imitate. It can't resurrect the ailing genre, though it does make its agony less painful.

Windows · by Unicorn Lynx (181773) · 2016

[ View all 17 player reviews ]

1001 Video Games

The Longest Journey appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

The publisher of The Longest Journey , Egmont Interactive, actually tried to turn April Ryan into a pop icon to match Lara Croft. To that end, they cast a real-life model for April -- 23 years old psychology student Katja Koopmann of Bremen, Germany -- and toured the major magazine and newspaper offices with her, dressed up like April and sputtering lines like “I find April sympathetic” with a somewhat forced smile. Once the PR machine runs, even mediocre game sales can’t stop it. On her way to media star, the virtual April next recorded a song -- a dance remix of the 80’s Depeche Mode tune The Balance -- and Katja lend her voice. Egmont spiced April’s image up with exceptionally stupid PR blurb like “I want everything! Above all, I want to show the people of your world something of the life here!” Generally ignored by the public, the song entered the stores on April 14th ‘00, and stayed there. The corresponding video clip was never played on the music channels, the song didn’t appear in the radio shows, and nobody bought the CD.

The main character's name is April Ryan, just like Ryan in the game Dreamweb , also published by Empire Interactive Entertainment. And the plots of both games have some things in common (the hero who suffers from nightmares and must save a world he/she didn't even know existed in the first place).

• A reference to the Monkey Island series : April's pet toy is called Constable Guybrush. And yes, it's a monkey.
• There are lots of references to sci-fi movies and fantasy themes. Most prominent are the references to Brazil , for instance, which takes place on a red tape-clogged insensitive world much like stark. Take a look at the lobby of the Church of Voltec, it's an exact replica of the Information Retrieval building on Brazil . Also the whole repairmen puzzle where they refuse to work on the grounds that it would require a specific form for them to do so is a spoof of the "Central Services" sequence in the movie. They are even dressed in the same way! There are many more, some more subtle than others.
• Want Star Wars references? check out that strange metal ball on the entrance to The Fringe Café. It says "Death Star" click on it and April will spout famous lines related to it, like "Let's blow this thing and go home!" and she even tries to imitate the voices!

The Longest Journey was originally made only to be released in Scandinavia, but it then grew with the sales to cover Europe and the U.S. By June of 2001, The Longest Journey had sold 250,000 copies worldwide, 90,000 of which were in America.

Version differences

In order to preserve his foreigner condition, Cortez had his nationality changed from Spanish to French and was renamed "Corthez" in the Spanish version.

Voice acting

• The character Marcus, who only appears in the first chapter near the Fringe cafè, and only has two lines, was voiced by Ragnar Tørnquist , the director/lead designer of the game for the English release.
• In the German pre-release demo version, April was voiced by German pop singer T-Seven known from the, at the time, successful Eurodance group Mr. President. In the final game, April was voiced by Stephanie Kindermann .
• April 2000 (Issue #201) - Adventure Game of the Year
• 2000 - Adventure Game of the Year

Information also contributed by -Chris , Agent 5 , jeremy strope , Karthik KANE , kelmer , Stargazer and Zovni

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Related Sites +

• Hints for The Longest Journey Adventurers will appreciate these hints. They let you solve the game yourself without spoiling it for you.
• Interview with Ragnar Tornquist Randy Sluganski talks with Mr. Tornquist about The Longest Journey and its upcoming sequel.
• TLJwiki A wiki covering the The Longest Journey series.
• The Divide .org - Powered by The Longest Journey Fans Fansite dedicated to The Longest Journey, an awesome PC adventure game produced by Funcom. Features fan fictions, fan arts, wallpapers, downloads, news, polls, and discussion board.
• Zarf's Review A review of The Longest Journey by Andrew Plotkin (December, 2002).

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• MobyGames ID: 1439

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by andyhat .

iPad, iPhone added by MrMamen .

Additional contributors: n-n , Robin Lionheart , curacao , Jeanne , JRK , Dec Ryan , Kabushi , Stratege , Zeppin , Laverne , Paulus18950 , Patrick Bregger , MrMamen , FatherJack .

Game added May 14, 2000. Last modified April 22, 2024.

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The Longest Journey

• High Quality 16.2 MB
• Low Quality 7.2 MB
• High Quality 9.4 MB
• Low Quality 5 MB

Get ready for the adventure of a lifetime. The Longest Journey is more than a game - it's more like a book, a movie and a game all rolled into one. Explore an interactive and beautifully created universe from the perspective of April Ryan, a young art student who soon discovers that there is more to her world than meets the eye.

With the power to pass between worlds like others pass from waking to sleep, April must embark on the longest journey of her life; a journey not only across twin worlds, but also into her very own heart and soul. Embark on a voyage across phenomenal worlds, encounter a fantastic cast of unforgettable characters, and unravel one of the most epic stories ever told.

Experience what critics around the world are calling one of the best adventure games of all time. Experience The Longest Journey !

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The Longest Journey is an amazing graphical adventure, where the player controls the protagonist, April Ryan, on her journey between parallel universes. Embark on an exciting and original journey of discovery, where you will explore, solve puzzles, meet new people, face terrifying monsters, learn, grow, and live the adventure of a lifetime!

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Hungry for more Dreamfall ? The devs are streaming the 2006 game and commenting live on TwitchTV , starting at 12PM EST.

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Dreamfall: The Longest Journey – Guide and Walkthrough

Guide and Walkthrough (PC) by holy_vink

Version: 2.0 | Updated: 08/31/2006

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