Ratings by Iznogood

Story
The story is indisputably the strongest part about the game.
It is a sequel to The Longest Journey and Dreamfall which has some of the best storytelling ever seen in a game, not just Adventure games but games in general, and even though Dreamfall Chapters perhaps doesn’t quite reach the same level of excellence, then it continues in the same path and takes place in the same rich universe.

Perhaps even more important, it is the second half of the story started in Dreamfall and brings a much needed conclusion to the story, something that we have been waiting for for 10 years! So even if it had only been mediocre in itself then it was something that we absolutely needed.

BUT there is also a rather large unbalance (pun intended) in the story or at least in the way that the story is told.

Dreamfall not only ended on a cliffhanger, but there was also quite a few balls left hanging in the air, but instead of simply gradually revealing these or letting Zoë discover this throughout the game, they decided to completely ignore all of that for the first 4 books, and then dump it all of us in one large exposition in book 5 - And that is simply not good storytelling in my book!

I mean would it really have been so bad if we had learned what had happened to the white of kin in the dark peoples library earlier in the game? Perhaps when Zoë first meets Crow. Obviously RTG wanted to keep the suspense and not reveal anything before the very end, but there are plenty of other revelations to be revealed, no need to save absolutely everything for a large endgame exposition.

And there are other problems, like in order to actually save these things for later, they have to pull the amnesia card on Zoë, and even to some degree on Crow - A cheap trick imo and something that was also completely unnecessary. Having Zoë remember what happened in Dreamfall would have changed the story, especially in the first two books, but not in any major way, you could still more or less have the same main plots without pulling the amnesia card.

On top of that there are also many story-arcs from the first game and even some started here in DC, that are just left hanging in the air, perhaps not outright retconned but instead just abandoned. Now I’m all for open ended endings and not explaining everything in minute details, but there is a rather large difference between leaving something open-ended and simply abandoning a story-arc completely.

I think that the main reason for this unbalance basically comes down to the time between the releases of the two games. RTG very clearly tried to make a game that would appeal to players that has never played the original Dreamfall. The problem however is that Chapters simply isn’t a new story taking place in the same universe, like what Dreamfall was to The longest Journey, it is the second half of the story started in Dreamfall, and in their eager to appeal to new players, RTG kind of forgot this - at least that is my interpretation.

Puzzles
When RTG pitched Chapters in the Kickstarter they referred to it as an adventure game, but sometime during the development they changed it to “a story driven game with adventure elements”, and that unfortunately shows.

The first book actually started out perfectly fine. It was perhaps not the most engrossing or difficult puzzles, but there where plenty of them, and the special dreamer abilities Zoë had in Storytime showed a lot of potential for excellent puzzles.

BUT already in the second book the TTG tendency started to show its ugly face, and even though there still was puzzles, then they started to take a backseat and decline in numbers, and by the third book we are down to something like one single puzzle per chapter.

The puzzles that there are are not necessarily bad, but they are most definitely on the easy side, and perhaps more important, there are several sequences that just begged to be a puzzle and could have been excellent puzzles imo, but for some inscrutable reasons instead ended up as cutscenes or boring non-puzzle tasks.

Well, at least they didn’t go the full monty and completely removed all puzzles, for that I’m grateful.

Choice & Consequences
Unlike in the TTG games the C&C system actually worked quite well. For the most part you choices actually made a difference, even if it was mostly only minor consequences. But in some cases it actually had some large influence and in one case you even had two completely different paths (shitbot vs. kidbot) based on your choice. So kudos to RTG for actually making a meaningful C&C system.

BUT I also can’t help wondering if this is really a game that is suited for the C&C style gameplay? The story is or at least should be strong enough to stand on its own without the need for this extra element. Also RTG has spend a lot of time, energy and resources on it, that perhaps would have been better spend on improving other aspect of the game.

Open world(ish)
The game is a direct control 3D game using the standard controls know from so many other genres, but only rarely used in adventure games. And more importantly it is fairly open world-ish, with two large hubs that you can freely explore at leisure, something that you only see very rarely in AG nowadays.

When they pitched the game in the kickstarter, this was actually the one thing that excited me the most, as this is something that I have been longing for in AG for a long time.

And at least in the first too books it didn’t disappoint!
I actually spend quite a long time just running around the two cites simply enjoying the scenery and the freedom of not being guided on rails and cramped into claustrophobic one room locations.

BUT this unfortunately didn’t last for the whole game. It is really only the first two books that takes advantage of this, and by the time we reach book 5 everything is back on rails with no free movement whatsoever. At one point they even had the perfect opportunity to let us run freely a bit, when we have to get from point A to B in Marcuria, but instead of letting us run ourselves, they instead teleport us directly to location B.

Whether they changed this because of all the whiners who were complaining about having to spend 2 minutes running to a destination yourself, instead of automatically being teleported as they are used to from other games, all the other whiners who apparently are severely directionally challenged and kept getting lost, or they changed it for some completely different reasons, that is an open question. But it is a sad thing that they were not able to maintain this vision for the duration of the game.

Graphics
In general the game looks incredible good, both in the character models and the backgrounds, and in the beginning I spend a lot of time simply running around enjoying the beautiful scenery in both Europolis and Marcuria.

Or at least it used to look incredible good, BUT then they updated the engine from Unity 4 to Unity 5!

This update was probably necessary for many reasons, and it did result in a large performance increase, but it unfortunately also completely broke all the graphics because of changes to the lightning model etc. This was something that RTG was never able to recover fully from, and they never managed to remake the graphics to that same high quality that it was before the update.

So what we ended up with instead was grossly over-saturated images that looks like an explosion at a paint store, especially in Marcuria, plastic like textures instead of realistic looking masonry and steel, and filters like peripheral vision blur, bloom and lens flare that perhaps can serve their purpose when used with moderation, but is clearly overused and completely destroys what otherwise was and could again have been beautiful scenery. And you can’t even turn these filters off in the settings, not anymore, that was actually possible in an earlier version but was removed in book 5 for some unknown reason!

Okay .. I’m probably exaggerating a bit here, and it mostly still looks okay, especially the characters, but seriously, I pity the players that never got to experience the graphics in its full glory before the Unity upgrade!

Episodic game
When the game was pitched in the kickstarter it was sold as a single game release, but for various reason RTG later changed it to an episodic release, something that also pissed a lot of people off.

The positive thing about this, is that it also allowed RTG to expand the game and make it much longer. Where it was originally planned as a 10-15 hours game, we now instead have a game that took me more that 30 hours to complete. So I can’t and will not complain about this decision.

BUT it is also very clear that this is not really a game suited for an episodic release. In order for an episodic game to work, each episode has to be a full game on its own, with a beginning, middle and end to each episode, and only an overall story arc across the episodes, but this is clearly not the case here, instead we have one large continued story.

It has also caused other problems, like some very noticeable design changes during the episodes, which gives it some consistency issues. In fact, with the release of book 5, they also remade some parts of the very first chapter, mainly to alleviate some of those consistency issues, and they are planning more changes before the physical and PS4 release. Something that imo should never happen for an episodic release, and is a clear sign they see the game themselves, as one whole and not as individual episodes.

Final verdict
4 out of 5 stars!

This might seem like a high rating based on the many issues mentioned above, but the simple truth is that the positive still by far outweighs the negative, and .. for Christ sake .. its a new game in the The Longest Journey series, my all time favourite series and a game we have been waiting for for 10 years!

It is an absolutely brilliant story that had me totally immersed for the duration of the game. It is a dark end of the world story with plenty of gore and cruel things happening, while at the same time the whole story is an enigma wrapped in a mystery, leaving you clueless as to what is actually going on for quite a long time. I can recommend it to anyone interested in this kind of dark mature story, simply for the story alone.

It also has an unique art style that suit the game very well and enhances the whole dark gritty setting. It has regular flashbacks and perhaps more important flashforwards, that also add a lot to the whole atmosphere of the game. 

It is unfortunately not all positive and there is also a few things that I didn’t really like, first and foremost:
The writing is about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the forehead!

Everything and I do mean absolutely everything has to be verbalised, and to make sure that we understand everything, then everything is repeated at least three times. On top of that the game is also filled with lengthy expositions, and for some godforsaken reason everybody feels the need to tell me their life story about 1/10 of a second after I meet them for the first time.

I am also not a big fan of the protagonist Michael. I quite honestly found him to be a bit of a whiner, and to make it worse, he also regularly does things that can only be described as outright stupidity. Where I however lost much of my remaining sympathy for him, was when he does something that is just outright cowardly imo.

The puzzles are as such not bad, they have a decent difficult and there are plenty of them, but they are all with one single exception, of the standard inventory type, which is a real shame as the whole setting could easily lend itself to some more interesting puzzles. There is as I see it a lot of wasted opportunity here.

The games does end on a bit of a cliffhanger but I don’t really mind that. Even if a sequel is never made, which I really hope it will be, then it just means that we have an open ended game that we can interpret whichever way we like, which is something there otherwise isn’t much of in this game.

It is a serious story, but it still has a lot of humour, it is cyperpunk with trance addicts and whatnot, but not as bleak as cyperpunk can sometimes be. The setting allows for a lot of interesting and well designed puzzles, like hacking not only AI but also peoples brains and messing things around in there.

If I have any complains, then it is that the writing can at times fell a bit heavy-handed, and some of the characters are really more of a caricature than real people. There is also a couple of cases where the mechanics of a puzzle interface could have been better communicated to the player.

But overall the positives far outweigh the negatives.

However, what starts as a little simple case of theft is of course nothing of the sort, and the story soon takes a major twist and turns into a much darker, sinister and larger tale, involving ritualistic murders, religious paintings in blood and, as players of the previous game might expects, also a supernatural element.

Equally, or perhaps even more important for the story, is that it also becomes a much more personal matter for our protagonist. It is not simply a case of a detective trying to solve some case, but about a women desperately trying to get to the bottom of events, and not giving up hope against all odds.

It is difficult to say more about the plot without giving some major spoilers, all I can say is that it will have you travelling around the world to many different locations, has some major plot twists, where at least one was something that I did not see coming until it was obvious, though it did explain a lot of things retrospect, and it also has a clear link to the original game. The story is also one of the most gripping stories that I have seen in an adventure game in some time, and it had me playing in long sessions totally immersed in the story unable to leave the game.

The main protagonist of the story is Laura, but we also get to control both Max and Kiera, an FBI agent and close friend of Laura, there is however and unfortunately no puzzles that requires using two characters in cooperation, and it is also not possible to switch character at will. In fact it all felt a bit forced, like having multiple playable characters was on their check-list and was shoehorned into the game, rather then being a natural part of it.

Another feature of the game is that it also has some choices that you have to make, and at least to some degree, branching story lines with different endings. Exactly how much difference it will make to the story, is a bit unclear to me as I have only played the game once, but I suspect that it only has a small impact, in return the choices I made blended seamlessly into the story without any inconsistencies or crossovers between the different branches. I also found that this in many ways worked better than in other games with similar choices like in The Walking Dead or Tesla Effect, that the decisions were both more important, and felt more like real choices I would have to make in similar circumstances, instead of some artificial choice system shoehorned into the game. In fact one of the choices had me contemplating it for a whole half hour, considering both the moral, ethical, practical and emotional implications and consequences before I made my choice.

There is a great variety of puzzles in the game, and let me just say it straight out, some of them are quite hard, also the game doesn’t offer any kind of hints or options to skip puzzle, the only help you get is a hotspot finder, so Memento Mori 2 is not an easy game! If you are only looking for an interactive experience for the sake of the story, then this is not the right game for you. If you however like me, like a challenge and don’t mind being stuck for hours trying to solve a puzzle, then this is the perfect game for you. 

It is also a very puzzle heavy and puzzle dense game, where you literally can’t spit without hitting a puzzle. For the most part the puzzles are however both interesting, well designed and fit perfectly into the story of the game, so you will only rarely fell like you are hindered in your progress by some artificial roadblock that are only there to prolong the game.

There are quite a few inventory puzzles of the McGyver kind, where you have to combine whatever objects are at hand to construct some tool, like in an early puzzle where you have to undo some bolts, which of course isn’t as simple as finding the right tool and surprisingly enough, involves a box of chocolate. There was even a puzzle that brought me back to the infamous cat-hair-moustache in GK3, though this time it makes much more sense and doesn’t involve any cats.

Where this game however shines in the puzzle department, is when it comes to the more logical and analytic puzzles. A large part of the game consists of Laura finding, gathering and analysing different clues and evidence, in fact a whole act in the game is basically one huge crime scene investigation. An example of this kind of analytic puzzles can be found early in the game, where we have to compare some fingerprints we have lifted with another set of fingerprints, in order to eliminate innocents and reconstruct a fingerprint of the culprit from several partial prints. This is not as easy as it sound, as they clearly went for realism here and you painstakingly have to manually identify markers in each print with similar markers on the control set.

That is however only one example and there is also many other forms of analyses you have to perform, like arranging evidence in a time-line in order to reconstruct the events, or pairing evidence to make Sherlock Holmes type deductions about them. One of the things that impressed me most about this game is that they never used the same analytic method twice. Each scene and type of evidence has its very own analytic method, not all are of course equally interesting or well designed, but the very fact that they are never reused contributed to making the puzzles fell fresh and keeping me interested to the very end.

The game even includes some optional puzzles usually in the form of dialogue puzzles, not optional in the way that you can skip or omit them, thought there might also have been a couple of those, but where it is completely optional to get them right. An early example of this is in Lyon where you are analysing some crime scene photos with some colleagues, as the lead detective everybody is of course looking at you to make the conclusions, but the only consequence of getting it wrong, is that someone will interrupt you and tell you how wrong you are! It might make you fell like someone has just thrown an egg in your face, but the only consequence is that you will lose some points, otherwise the game will just continue.

Unfortunately the game also has a few puzzles that requires an enormous amount of trial and error. An example of this is a situation where you have to recreate a shadow by moving a light source around using some photos as a reference. In itself a brilliant idea for a puzzle that could have worked very well, but doesn’t. The problem is that the photos only gives you an approximate position but the shadow has to be placed with millimetre precision, and there is no less than six parameters that you can adjust, and to make it even worse, every time you adjust one parameter you have to adjust two or three others to get the shadow back in the approximate position. Fortunately these are the exception from the rule, and most puzzle are much better designed.

The game also features a point system in the form of a percentage for each chapter. The way you earn these points is be getting the optional/dialogue puzzle right, solving puzzles in as few moves as possible or by simply avoiding doing any silly mistakes, like fiddling with the electricity in a room filled with gas. The game however never tells you when there is a possibility to earn points, nor when you have screwed up and missed any, it only tells you when you have done it right, so even with some save-scumming it is almost impossible to get max point, and my standard reaction when looking at my meagre score at the end of each chapter, was “What the f***, where the h*** did I go wrong”. As far as I could tell, the score however doesn’t affect the story or the ending, at least I got what I assume is the best ending despite having a somewhat mediocre score.

Now I don’t think I can avoid mentioning the elephant in the room any more, even though I have been postponing it for as long as possible:

The English localization is far from perfect!

It both contains some outright translation errors and some odd wordings which has clearly been translated too literally, it is however not the worst I have seen in a translated game and not the main problem with the localization. The main problem is that they made quite a few errors when linking the English voice acting into the game. Sometimes the voice part would be missing completely and you only get the subtitles, surprisingly often the voice acting and the subtitles would be completely different, usually because the voice part was actually from a different dialogue and not related to the current scene at all, sometimes the voice bits would stutter and repeat the same sentence twice, and worst of all, there is one scene where both the voice and the subtitles were completely missing. This was extra disastrous as it was actually a critical scene with some important information, at least I assume it was important based on the reactions of the characters and from what I was able to deduce about it.

To have a few errors in the localizations is forgiveable, though not ideal, but this amount of errors is simply ridiculous, and this is something that they have to fix asap.

Regardless, if you can look past these errors, then the script is actually quite good. For the most part the dialogue is sharp, precise and gets to the point without any lengthy expositions or feeble attempts at being funny. Apart from the odd wordings here and there, the dialogue also fells both natural and plausible as something that character would actually say.

The English voice acting is also of a general high quality, I especially found that the actress portraying the main character of Laura did an excellent job, and both managed to convey some emotional moments with subtlety without falling into either extremes of over- or underplaying it, and also managed to portray Laura as both a plausible and likeable character totally consistent with the story being told.

As for the graphics and animations, then it probably won’t win any awards and you shouldn’t expect beautiful hand drawn 2d backgrounds, but the 3d environment is not bad and at least in some places quite good. There is also nothing to complain about regarding the animations, and close-ups of characters does manage to convey emotions in a plausible manner.

Finally it is also not a short game, according to Steam it took me about 24 hours to complete it, though I have to admit that at least some of that time was spend banging my head against the table in frustration about that shadow puzzle, and I also have to confess to a bit save-scumming trying to improve my score. 

In a time where it seems that the recent trend is games that almost play themselves, and where developers are afraid to add any real challenges because they don’t want to break the immersion of the players and interfere with the storytelling, then it is extremely refreshing to come across a game that dares to go against the trend and actually challenge us. Not the least because it also proves that storytelling and difficult puzzles are not each others antipode, and that it is possible to make a game that has difficult puzzles and still manages to have the players totally immersed in it

If we start with the positive, then I found it had an overall intriguing story with some good but not excellent writing, the background art ranged from being beautiful to adequate, it had an interesting protagonist and some good voice acting and soundtrack. And perhaps most important for me, it had some new and interesting puzzles with both the Sherlock Holmes type character deductions and the “match historical person” deductions, which I at least in the beginning found worked very well.

These positive things however began to be overshadowed by the more negative aspects the longer I progressed in the game, and the more time I had to think about them. No - I’m not talking about the character models or the animation, which never really bothered me despite being subpar, nor am I talking about the maze at the end which I found was okay but nothing special.

First of all it is a very linear game with little to nothing you can do in parallel, and it mainly consists of very small locations with only a single or two screens at most locations, and only a few larger locations. Both are very common in modern adventure games, but has never been my cup of tea, I prefer larger locations that I can freely explore and many different objectives that I can work on in parallel. I simply prefer more freedom in how I want to play the game, than following some narrow path that the designers have prepared for me.

The game is also a fairly easy game and a relative short game at about 10 hours, neither which is really to my liking. I cant really complain about the length given the budget, but I do wish it would have been just a little bit more challenging.

Then there is the Sherlock Holmes type character deductions, in the beginning I quite enjoyed those, but you are really basing your deduction on too few datapoints, based on these there would in reality be many more different conclusions you could make that were equally valid. I also found that instead of making these deductions to determine what kind of character I was dealing with, like Sherlock Holmes would do, then I was instead reverse-engineering them, I would first figure out what the character was like, based on the setting and more important the narrative rules of the game (what kind of character would story-wise work best in this situation), and then I would simply click the options that best fitted this. 

Similar with the “match historical person” deductions, in the beginning I quite enjoyed these, but after a while it began to become apparent that the narrative of the game demanded that it was a match for a specific type of historic person, and I would know who after only having collected a very few clues. It always detracts from a story or game when the narrative rules shines through in this way.

Then there is the whole Moebius theory that the game is based upon, this is of course all a load of supernatural mumbo jumbo and in fact too much mumbo jumbo for my personal taste. But stories about or containing supernatural elements has always been Jane Jensen’s trademark, and normally it doesn’t bother me simply because it is so well made, but it did bothered me this time. Let me explain why:

First we have the whole concept of the Moebius theory, and two character who are suppose to be some sort of reincarnation of some important historical persons or some sort of reoccurring archetype of great leaders. Fair enough, it sound a bit silly but it still has the potential of a great story.

Then we have a villain whose purpose seems to be to interfere with or change these reoccurring patterns. Okay… I wish s(he) had been fleshed out more and given a stronger motive for his/her actions, than the somewhat foolish motive given in the game, but I can accept that, after all the game is not about the villain.

Where my eyes started to glaze over a bit, is when it comes to FITA’s role in this game. Not only are we now moving from the realm of the supernatural into the realm of the outright far fetched, a government agency that is based around the Moebius theory - Seriously?!? And worse then that, it is not only far fetched but also a cheap plot device in my opinion! Jane needed someway to get Malachi involved in the story, and more important, she needed someway for Malachi to gain access to all these high society people and ensure police cooperation etc., and the easiest way to do that was to have someone pave the way for him. I would much have preferred if Malachi had gotten involved in this story in a more natural way, and that he would have had to investigate the story on his own, but this would also have required a lot of extra scenes and puzzles, so I guess we can write this down to the budget constrains.

Where Jane however completely lost me story-wise was when we have identified two characters as being similar to historical persons. Everybody just assumes that because they fit the pattern, then it will also mean that they are destined to do something great, and not even Malchi who supposedly has an IQ of 175 and otherwise plays the role of the sceptic that gets convinced, questions this. But even if we take the Moebius theory of reoccurring patterns and archetypes seriously, then this doesn’t automatically follow, instead we are now talking about predetermined and unchangeable destinies. But if the Moebius theory means this is predestined to happen, then it also leaves us with a bit of a paradox and a rather large plot hole.

It is like Jane is trying to both have her cake and eat it at the same time, and that she both wants a story where predestination plays an important part, but at the same time also doesn’t, as there then wouldn’t be a story to tell. Personally I would much have preferred if she had completely removed the predestination part and instead just focused on the reoccurring archetypes, but the story could also have worked with predestination, it just requires a few modifications, but instead of this she chose to completely ignore this paradox, and as far as I’m concerned that greatly detracts from the story.

Now I know that all the above can sound like I really hated the game, but that is not the case, despite the many issues I had with the game, the simple truth is that I still enjoyed playing it. It is just not what it potentially could have been, and it is far from the best game Jane Jensen has made.