A Collection Aside
This month, MEGHANN O’NEILL made a series of reactionary game choices. It happens when the series you’ve been playing for 17 years is finally resolved, and so perfectly. Not much point in trying to replace it, at least until some time has passed. Gotta fi
I didn’t know what I wanted from a game ending until Dreamfall Chapters gave it to me
Adventure games of the 1980s taught me to expect exactly one ending: the one where the characters get together and have a big party, even the antagonists and bridge trolls. I did want the opportunity to say goodbye, given the side quests and struggles, but these cutscene-style celebrations always felt like mere hand-waving to that desire. Or, in the final moments of a recent AAA RPG, I was given bountiful farewelling options, but everyone kept warning me not to exit the festivities until I was sure I was done. It made me impatient to see the real ending, sexy surface dwarves aside.
I guess I didn’t know what I wanted from a game ending, until Dreamfall Chapters gave it to me. I wanted to be led, but generously. Answers to the ancient questions I’d almost forgotten to ask were revealed, just as I started to remember and guess at them. After all, I’d started playing the series when a friend gave me The Longest Journey, 17 years ago. New beginnings were tied back to original content, to show how much persistent characters had grown and changed over time. Many things were left unsaid, but other stories were told more explicitly than I’d dared hope.
The staggered delivery of this third game, in five books, did convolute the narrative, making it difficult to remember the relevance of everything from political machinations to lunch choices, over the months between releases. I’d stopped playing during Book 3 because, without the immediate promise of closure, keeping track of characters and goals seemed too much like hard work. Although I’d delayed starting Books 4 and 5, I’m glad I played them together. Once I got started, I couldn’t stop. There’s a palpable momentum to the unfolding of events, disturbed by only light puzzling.
Despite this, and as with the entire series, the writers don’t shy away from introducing completely new threads of story, while also leaving entire worlds behind. In Book 3, where Propast was increasingly dystopian, with drones observing even your most innocuous movements, I was heartened to find that Egil Olsen was simply busking around a corner, not dead. Now I’m pretty sure he’s dead or, hopefully, cannily shaking a can of soda in the direction of a Robocop. The future of Europolis may be hinted at, but this massively detailed setting isn’t explored further. Indeed, it’s interesting how they’ve allowed the story to simply develop in a forwards direction, without needing to adhere to an expected structure. Entirely new levels are made for the end of the game, just to serve the narrative, like in To the Moon. But this is not to say that content isn’t revisited. There is one amazing sequence where you’re simply chatting with Crow and rowing through a cavern. If you’re a series veteran, you may know the place. I was tearing up with memories from the first two games, even though, in this iteration, nothing new happens there.
Probably for the first time, I’d unreservedly recommend the entire Dreamfall series to newcomers, mostly because I know your time will ultimately be respected and you’ll leave satisfied, even without the decades’ long appetite for more. They’ve crafted these last chapters carefully and I envy your new journey, from the tired perspective of one who has finally completed hers. Experiencing a game series over such a long period of time is incredibly special and the great collage of science, magic, dragons, rubber duckies, religion, power and wonder will stay with me forever.