The idea of being able to lucid dream all day, every day is something that sounds pleasing at first, but it could also be very damaging to the brain. Dreamfall Chapters starts off with this premise, and quickly turns into an intriguing adventure game set in a beautiful cyberpunk future.
Developed by Red Thread Games, Dreamfall Chapters is a direct sequel to Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. You have control to two protagonists, Zöe Castillo and Kian Alvane. Zöe’s adventure begins in a dream world where she has been placed into a coma after trying to uncover a conspiracy. The developers were kind enough to put a recap video in the game for those that didn’t play Dreamfall: The Longest Journey when it was released in 2006.
Thanks to Dreamachines, citizens of Stark, which is a dystopian Earth set in 2220, are now addicted to lucid dreaming. You’ll traverse Europolis, which is a cyberpunk megalopolis set in central and western Europe. The world created by Red Thread is fun to run around in and take in the different sites.
As Zöe, you’ll be able to traverse Europolis at your own pace, taking in all the sites of a very well built cyberpunk universe. As you could imagine, there are plenty of neon lights everywhere, but it also has a realistic feel to the city. Walking through the bar district in Europolis is a familiar site to any bar district right now, except for the futuristic looking cars parked along the street.
Around the city you’ll also notice many political ads. There is a political race going on, and Zöe will be right at the front as she volunteers for one of the campaigns. If you are one that wants politics as far away as possible from video games, you might want to skip this one.
As mentioned earlier, you do take control of a second character. Kian’s story in Book One was around an hour or so, with Zöe’s story taking up the other 2 hours and 45 minutes of Book One. Kian is a warrior in the fantasy of Arcadia, which players were introduced to in Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Arcadia was founded by using the Dreamachines, and has a familiar look to any fantasy place in a video game.
Kian is in prison for treason, and he finds out he’ll be executed the next day. I don’t want to spoil what happens, so I’ll just say that Kian’s part of the game is filled with many puzzles that you’ll have to solve.
Gameplay is very much in the spirit of an adventure game. You run around, click on objects to see what they are, talk to people, and run quests. At times it can be a bit confusing on what to do next. There is an objectives menu, but it can be vague with things like “Find so-and-so” without giving you any kind of direction. Towards the end of Book One I found myself running around the entire city looking for this one person.
Another complaint I had was having to click on the same object to get the story to advance. This is a trope with some adventure games, and it doesn’t change with Dreamfall Chapters. You will click on an object, and it won’t do anything, so you go around trying to click on everything else, before you realize you had to click on that first object three times instead of once. It can be a little frustrating when you spend 10 minutes clicking on everything when all you needed to do was click on the first thing multiple times.
Dreamfall Chapters is a good adventure game. At times the pace can be pretty slow, but I would say overall that the story has me intrigued enough to see what happens in Book Two. This is a great game to pour a beer, relax, and take in a beautiful world that the developers have created. If you’re looking for something a bit more engaging, I would look elsewhere.
Score: 8.5/10
Dreamfall Chapters was developed and published by Red Thread Games for PC, Mac, and Linux on October 21st. A retail copy of the PC version was provided to us by Red Thread Games for reviewing purposes.
