Dreamfall : The Longest Journey – Be With You (Magnet)

A continuation of The Longest Journey by Funcom, the game of famous Ragnar Tørnquist. Here we travel to another imaginational dreamland, here in the form of two worlds – Stark (hi tech future) and Arcadia (magical outworld). It’s an action adventure game with an intense, emotional and twisted plot, that sucks you in. In the first game, the main here was April Ryan, a college girl who happen to experience some unusual events to finally discover a passage from “real world” to someplace else. The second game is less cliche and hence more appealing. Here we encounter Zoe Castillo, a freshly graduated spanish-and-a-little-bit-asian looking girl, who isn’t a typical heroine. She doesn’t have magical powers, great ass or insanely overgrown boobs. In fact, Zoe feels like she doesn’t know what to do with her life, some kind of malaise and marasm eats her. She’s unable to make any decent choice and life feels just bland for her.
As April, Zoe, by series of accidents will be dragged into another world, discovering a big plot and dangerous plan of big entertainment corporation WATI. She will find amazing friends and fierce enemies on her way, but also will enter Arcadia and meet April Ryan. After that, friends will mix with enemies and the multilayer of Dreamfall charaters’ psyche will be even more visible.

The game has a very “warm” feeling to it. It’s either the sun of Casablanca, Zoe’s initial city, or cosy coat worn in winters of Arcadia. There’s also something very soothing in Zoe’s voice. It’s also very aesthetically pleasing and the music adds to the whole thing. As a main character, Zoe’s surprisingly very plausible, adorable, but not “cute”. You can feel that Zoe’s a real human with her own mind and her own set of problems, that don’t have immediate resolutions. Even the initial part of the game is just Zoe’s regular day – wake up, mess around in the bedroom, get dressed, go downstairs, get a cup of something to drink, chat with her dad, visit friend in local electronics room, talk to recently-dumped boyfriend, attend her taichi classes and so on. This way you can connect with the character. The plot is sometimes too wacky, there are many characters and as with first part of the game, you feel that a lot of strings are not connected and you don’t really know what happened and how it all ended. This is mostly because of the fact, that the whole story was likely scripted for 3 parts. Will we see the Dreamfall : Chapters someday? I hope so.

I’ve linked to a fan-made video with the song, presenting nice pictures of the game.

More about Dreamfall : The Longest Journey –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamfall:_The_Longest_Journey