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Adventure games have been in a bit of a rut lately. With the Myst series dead (for now) and no other good series stepping up to the plate, those who like wandering through mysterious places and solving ornery puzzles have been more or less out of luck. That all changes with Dreamfall. It’s not a perfect game by any means, but it’s still one of the best adventure titles in years.

Semi-Sequel

Dreamfall is a follow-up to 2000’s equally good The Longest Journey, sharing a few characters and some thematic elements. Like its predecessor, Dreamfall features a few different playable characters, but most of the time you’ll be running around as umlauted babe Zoë Castillo, who at least initially is dealing with a seemingly unbearable case of the Monday’s.

As you guide Zoë through the early portions of the game you’ll have to listen to her whine and complain to her friends about how bored she is hanging out in her lavish pad, and even explain to her boyfriend that she basically broke up with him because, well, she couldn’t think of anything better to do. Just when you think you’re really going to hate spending any more time with her, things suddenly get interesting. Zoë gets attacked while running an errand for said boyfriend, who suddenly goes missing. After a little illegal snooping you and Zoë pick up his trail and the game gets moving.

Adventurer Not a Fighter

Dreamfall is for the most part a straightforward action adventure title. It’s played from a third-person perspective using the game’s 3-D engine. The controls and camera can feel a little clumsy when using the default keyboard and mouse setup, but playing with a game-pad of some sort helps. Despite being a PC game it was obviously designed to be console-friendly, which doesn’t always equate to keyboard-friendly. Combat especially is very poorly done, requiring you to click ferociously on the mouse buttons to attack. The whole thing feels very clumsy and out of place in this otherwise moderately paced game.

Thankfully, there’s not a lot of fighting. Much of the time you’ll be exploring a variety of locales, each of which is large and very organic looking. However, they’re also very well designed so that, even though you don’t have a map to guide you, you can generally find your way without too much trouble. You’ll be wandering through everything from a packed city of the future to a mysterious icy wasteland, and it all looks quite good. Each area is full of small details that will catch your eye as you wander through, giving you many frames of reference.

The puzzles, too, are fairly well designed. Some feel a bit arbitrary, like the constant lock-picking, but even those are enjoyable enough. Puzzles here will make you think, but serious adventure-hounds will likely blow through them very quickly. As adventure games go, this one isn’t the most challenging, but neither is it ever boring. It moves quickly from place to place, and while you’re forced to back-track occasionally to pick up something or another, it never feels like the game is trying to trick you or slow you down to make itself last a little longer.

Personable

One of the best features of the game is the very personable characters you’ll interact with. In most adventure games the faces you’ll see might as well be painted on cardboard. It’s rare that adventure games feature any sort of character development beyond the main character and finding such a game with solid voice acting is nigh impossible. Dreamfall features both in spades, and while it may sound like a minor point, it actually adds a lot to the game. Every character has a very distinctive look, way of acting, and even set of animations that makes each one feel like an individual personality in the game.

While the graphics engine doesn’t deliver incredibly detailed character models, the designs make the most of it. Characters often have large eyes or other sorts of stylistic enhancements that gives them a slightly cartoon-style look, but not in a Disney kind of way. Rather than trying to make them look exactly human through a graphics engine that wouldn’t hold up, they look sculpted or hand-drawn, an effect that comes off rather well. Everyone does have a tendency to be a bit chatty at times, but a press of the spacebar makes conversations end rather quickly.

Quest Worth Taking

Dreamfall is a well told and very accessible sort of adventure game. Many gamers who bore easily in similar titles will find themselves quite intrigued by the storyline that jumps from future-tech to medieval war and back again. It’s not a game for everyone by any means, and just about everyone will hate the combat sections, but it’s definitely a game that adventure fans will appreciate.