The longest journey is so much more than an adventure game, it's an experience.
You play as April Ryan, a young art student, basically helping her finding the reason for her mysterious dreams and visions. April lives in Venice, Newport in the future (this world called Stark in the game) but early April is introduced to another world, Arcadia, where magic and adventure is the keywords. April will soon find out that something is wrong and the balance between these two worlds is shifting. And the fantastic adventure is taking form.
The story is what makes The Longest Journey so incredible; unpredictable, breathtaking, surprising.
Extremely well written and close to never ending. Almost as important as the story is the voice acting and luckily April Ryan is voiced by the talented Sarah Hamilton. She is just excellent and is followed by several brilliant voice actors, another reason why the game is so fantastic.
And the voice acting is essential course the main focus of the game is listening to dialogue. And there is a lot of it - and I mean A LOT. There are 50+ characters to interact with and most of them haven't talk to anyone for years, or so it seems, course once you get them started, they won't stop.
Since the dialogue is intelligently written it's natural, funny and entertaining.
Of course an adventure game contains puzzles and just like the dialogue part, there are plenty to do. Not all of them are logical in nature, but almost all is solvable – if you've got the time. For some reason I had a great challenge with a couple of them at the start of the game (chapter two), but after that everything past without headache of any kind.
The graphics is, even for standards today, acceptable. 8 years is a long time in this industry, but the aged gives the graphics a certain charm.
The sound is definitely quality and the soundtrack is super, especially "Prologue", "Winterland" and "Dragon". The score is composed by Bjorn Arve Lagim and Tor Linlokken. Nice job, boys.
If you can't get enough of April Ryan, open the book of secrets and enjoy outtakes, the additional score and art gallery. The book of secrets can be accessed by finishing the game or planting the plastic leaf during chapter four.
Finally - what makes this game so special is the fact that it came out of nowhere. Not many in the gaming industry had expected The Longest Journey to be so unique and brilliant.
Conclusion
The Longest Journey is destined to make a huge impact, if you reach the end. And if you do, you know within that is was worth all the hours you spend, the family reunion you didn't attend, your mothers birthday you forgot, the phone line you cut, the friends you lost and the other adventure games colleting dust.
Not even the longest review can describe a tenth of the beauty that is The Longest Journey. So if you haven't played it yet, I strongly advice you to get clicking. I hope you've come to love this game as much as I do. Enjoy.