Thankfully things pick up around the midway point and the rest of the game is genuinely interesting, especially when Zoe and Kian’s stories start to overlap and eventually reach the same conclusion. The almost glacial pace of the narrative at the beginning is a huge misstep for Dreamfall Chapters and, honestly, often felt like a chore to play through despite being more than mechanically sound from a gameplay perspective. This may seem like it’d be detrimental to the cohesion of the game as a whole bit it actually works in its favour once you start getting weary with one storyline, the game suddenly switches things up and maintains your interest throughout… At least after the plodding first two chapters, anyway. A character that will be familiar to fans, Saga, also factors into the stories to a degree, but for the most part these divergent plot threads play out on their own without any real overt connection to each other. After a chance encounter leads to his freedom, Kian soon finds himself embroiled in the efforts of a group of rebels intent on toppling the tyrannical ruling empire. We are also introduced to Kian, a former assassin and prisoner who calls the magical realm of Arcadia home. The first prong of the story follows Zoe, a denizen of the dystopic industrialised world of Stark with much of the population under the thrall of addiction to lucid dreaming machines, political machinations rage on behind the scenes unnoticed by all but a few… Including Zoe. The story is split between two parallel worlds and their protagonists, much like Double Fine’s The Broken Age, albeit handled in a much more sombre manner. The core conceit behind Dreamfall Chapters is actually quite intriguing, even if we have seen similar tales played out in games before. I realise that that last paragraph sounds like a direct contradiction to my previous griping but Dreamfall Chapters DOES craft a fairly compelling story but the uneven pacing and overreliance on previous knowledge of the series undeniably hampers the game somewhat, particularly as this is likely to be the first contact point for PlayStation gamers. Just because a game is longer doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better value for money, however, so Dreamfall Chapters is fortunate enough to have both the technical and narrative chops behind it to justify the purchase. In terms of length, Dreamfall Chapters offers up a surprising amount of content, with all five chapters offering up nearly forty hours of gameplay, far exceeding the one or two hour punches of similar titles. Me? No previous experience with the series unfortunately resulted in having no frigging idea what was going on half the time.Ī benefit that comes from purchasing Dreamfall Chapters on current-gen consoles is that the entire series is available to play from the get-go, so no pesky intervals between the prerequisite cliffhanger endings. Of course, this is an issue that only applies to players unfamiliar with The Longest Journey and Dreamfall, so your mileage will undoubtedly vary in this respect. You can piece together enough disparate threads of plot points from the previous entries if you pay enough attention to the dialogue and character interactions but the game doesn’t really take the time to orientate you in this universe in a way where you don’t feel like you’ve stumbled into the final act of a play moments before the curtain drops. The third entry in a Seventeen year old series, Dreamfall Chapters is an episodic title that, despite the solid mechanics and fairly engaging gameplay, suffers somewhat in terms of accessibility as you’d expect with the climax of a long-running story, there are quite a few plot threads to get to grips with as well as a hefty chunk of backstory necessary to fully understand the action that’s unfolding upon the screen.
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