Despite having an entire week to ourselves, my boyfriend and I only managed to finish one game, Dreamfall, the Longest Journey. If you want an actual, full-fledged review, I suggest you visit GameSpot’s review.
A couple of issues I had with their review:
First, GameSpot seems always to pander to the “core gamers”, rather than the leisurely ones. Honestly, Dreamfall is targeted at people like my parents, which is why I bought it for my mom for her birthday. This makes the review slightly frustrating because they do not criticize it in the same way as they would if they took the game’s target audience into account. For example, Kasavin makes a small reference to the game’s controls, that “Dreamfall plays more like an action adventure game” than a point-and-click adventure and “The game controls quite well. The camera can get a little awkward in tight quarters, but since there aren’t many action sequences, this is almost never a liability.”
I would say, understanding my parents, that the controls were terrible. Granted, I was only frustrated for a few minutes, but the game controls by moving with the arrow keys and moving the camera with the mouse, but there is no cursor, and you have to wave your mouse around until you get a blue square and click on it. Granted, this might not seem very trying to the average gamer, but for people who rarely play games or *only* play adventure games, this is stupid, pointless, and only detracts from the game. This is one of the main reasons that Myst: Uru sucked. The reason why it is such a big deal is there is a tendency for very casual or virgin gamers to get frustrated with the controls right off the bat, and most point-and-click adventure games are incredibly simple for that reason alone.
The other thing I disagreed with is that the game did not really need gameplay, which Kasavin argues a number of different times. While he admits that there was not a lot of gameplay in the game itself, he also states that it was not important anyway
While I would say that the story was very good, and the dialogue and voice acting were also very good, I am saying this in the context of a video game. There *must* be gameplay to accompany the storyline, or else it feels like I am reading a very long, drawn out, terribly written book. Because yes, the dialogue is fairly well-written, but compared to, you know, reading a classic, it’s about as dull, uninventive, absurd dialogue I’ve ever read. I would have put it down faster than I did The Davinci Code.
The puzzles also felt incredibly easy and the combat was just superfluous, though it did provide options in a singular event in the game.
However, my negativity is probably too great (I’ve been watching too much Yahtzee), as it is a good adventure game, better than most of the tripe The Adventure Company puts out (though those games tend to have more puzzles/adventure/gameplay). The voice acting was absolutely stellar, and the environments were really nice.
The story was very engaging and interesting, and left a hell of a cliffhanger at the end. It was also well paced and kept me interested throughout the entire game.
I think the one part that struck me, and something that I wanted to talk about (which Kasavin did not mention once) is the feminist aspect of the game. Generally, I am accustomed to female main characters in adventure games. I feel that they are aiming at women largely with this sort of game anyway, and I also feel that there is a greater possibility of a female designer working on an adventure game than, say, a first person shooter.
First, well, the main character is female. She is generally fully clothed, other than a few underwear sequences (but even those are tasteful and she is not absurdly proportioned). There are many female characters in high positions, in fact most of them are in positions of power. Honestly, there were very few males in the game and they were mostly boring or serving only as love interests. Talking about this makes it seem so obvious, but it took me forever to figure out that they really were overcompensating. This seemed fairly unremarkable to me, but it is interesting when you think about how real life is generally the other way around.
The thing that finally brought this to my attention is when one of the playable characters said something to the tune of, “See? This is why females [rather than males] should run things.” I was agape, mostly because this was so direct about the feminist message. They weren’t trying to paint a picture which features equality of the sexes, they were honestly designing a game to compensate for the sexism of the gaming industry.
Honestly, though, while satiating some parts of me, this bothered me. If he hadn’t said it, I would never have noticed. I tend to write like that when I do write, with mostly females and a couple of boring, one-sided male side-characters. I think this bothered me because of the fact that if they were honestly focusing that much on feminism or whatever, they really should have had a game which had men and women on equal footing, rather than displaying an entirely matriarchal society. I do not think that there has to be an extreme. I believe that equality can be achieved, with patience and effort, and it is not a matter of one sex or the other reigning supreme.
On the other hand, if this was a message to gamers, that there is sexism in the gaming industry, and it is only really noticeable if the tables are turned, would an adventure game really be the best venue for that? Honestly, so many of these games are at least somewhat geared towards casual female players, doesn’t it seem like they are preaching to the choir?
Tags: Feminism by futile
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