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+--- Thread: Dreamfall XBLA (/showthread.php?tid=4752)
Dreamfall XBLA - A Black Falcon - 20th March 2008
The gameplay is kind of boring, but the story is fantastic. Graphics are okay. I finally got it for PC in January... it's a very good game, thanks to the great story, but the puzzles are really easy (and involve a lot of hand holding) and a lot of it is just "go there, get the thing, then go over there, then do that, then come back"... I know they were trying something new, to deal with the death of the traditional, high-budget adventure game (with the original The Longest Journey being one of the last great traditional adventure games), but it didn't completely work. It's also quite short compared to the 30 hour TLJ... oh well. It's the interesting story that really carries it.
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/37635/Dreamfall-The-Longest-Journey-Coming-to-XBox-Live-Marketplace
Dreamfall XBLA - Dark Jaguar - 20th March 2008
The problem is they attempted to add in some action style adventuring. Certainly they did a lot better than Mask of Eternity's sour attempt, but I much prefer traditional puzzle solving. I don't mind if my life is at risk in the game if I solve a puzzle badly, but yes, "hand walking" is getting to be a bit of an annoyance. There comes a point where trying to cater to a casual crowd makes the game less enjoyable. Though I'm not the sort to really consider MOST complaints as all that relavent, when you over the years see cryptic riddles as hints in the Zelda games slowly turn into direct statements as hints, well it makes me feel like I'm considered a moron. In adventure games, I slowly saw the options in how to interact with my environment dwindle down to a bare faced "single action" interface and literal glowing of cursors over the correct thing to "point at", again coupled with rather direct indications of what I need to do instead of cryptic hints.
King's Quest sort of took this simplication in the form of taking their cursor interface and reducing it from 5 or so to just one cursor and thus reducing how I can explore the world, but even then I still had to solve a lot of puzzles in the form of looking at really strange things like hieroglyphs or overhearing some small part of a tune to solve a puzzle. There was no fairy flying around saying "HEY! THAT SYMBOL IS THE SAME ONE AS THE CREST OF HYRULE! MAYBE IF YOU PLAY THAT SONG ON YOUR OCARINA!"
At the very least, Twilight Princess is an example of a reversing of that situation. The dungeons actually took longer to solve. That said, the dungeons are a bit more linear now. I noticed that very often I could never seem to get into situations where I got a bunch of keys and could pick and choose how to use them. I always had one key for one door and the exact order of how to do the dungeon is spelled out directly to me. Well, the sky temple seemed more open though.
Still, it reminds me of things in the past, like where you could get a lot of keys and depending on which doors you used them on, you had to solve some things in weird orders or maybe even do some odd gymnastics to get through the door you didn't use the key on. Or, maybe you just wasted your key on a dead end, but you also learned the fairy spell in town just a while ago, so you can transform yourself into a fairy and fly through the keyhole.