Given the fairly brief running time of the episode, Red Thread do well to construct and communicate the politics of their dystopia. For the duration of Book One, however, Zoe engages with problems close to home. 'Is this all?', she seems to ask and while we know that it isn't, we also know that she might soon wish that it were.
Life, love and labour may not be terrible, but there's something sad and resigned in her attempts at enthusiasm. And it works - Zoe is believable in her barely concealed exasperation at the state of her existence. There's a (presumably) conscious echo of The Longest Journey's opening in the beginning of Chapters, with the gesture toward the power of dreams and fate overshadowed by the ordinary trials of life, love and labour.
DREAMFALL CHAPTERS TROPES SERIES
I've always enjoyed the series most when it has managed to walk the line between magic and mundanity, muddying them together like paints on a palette. Between the prologue and Europolis, the jail break takes place, introducing swords, sorcery and the fantasy land of Arcadia, although there's not a great deal of it to see at this point, given the jail element of the scene. Given that there's a prologue of sorts set in the realm of Dreamtime, where Zoe is a saviour of sorts to those poor souls who have become lost while interfacing with a Dream Machine, I was somewhat relieved when I found myself reading journal entries about holidays in the sun and everyday worries. The workings of fate and the overlap between Dreamfall's several worlds fade into the background - Zoe's tasks for the day involve buying lunch from a food stall, visiting her boyfriend and checking in at work, where she will test out the abilities of a confused machine not-so-affectionately known as Shitbot. From lingering at the fringes of bodily existence, she becomes vital again, with no memory of her grander purpose. Zoe is in a new place, attempting to kindle the sparks of an old relationship, and without any fanfare Dreamfall Chapters becomes a story about beginnings rather than endings.
Something strange happens when the pace slows. The scale of what is happening, particularly in the opening scenes, is vast - world-ending, myth-shattering, fate-fiddling stuff - and it's only when the story settles into Zoe's new life in Europolis that we zoom in and get a read on the purely personal rather than the preternatural level. The game is attractive - although I sense the bite of the budget or the edges of the engine in the depiction of certain events, particularly a jailbreak in which rioting is kept conspicuously off-screen - and the script is strong.Īnyone going in cold, without knowledge of the previous games, might be slightly baffled, even though there is an attempt to ease into the story. Minor additions aside, I didn't play anything in Book One that I hadn't already seen. Europolis, the neon hub of marketing and militant police that you'll spend the majority of this first episode exploring, is more heavily populated and some scenes have been altered to improve the flow of the story, or to provide pointers where objectives weren't entirely clear. It's around five hours long and I've written about most of the content already, although there have been some additions and tweaks since the preview build I played.
The Chapters are now divided into Books and yesterday saw the release of the first. The Longest Journey began a decade and a half ago and Dreamfall Chapters marks the end of that journey.īut not yet. Parting is such sweet sorrow and all that, but it's beneficial to have some closure. When you spend so long hoping for the continuation and conclusion of a story that was part of your earlier life, it's a bittersweet relief to hear that the waiting is finally over.
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