Before leaving, she bid farewell to Crow and mentioned something about her destiny as the "Dreamer" a metaphysical role regarding the multiverse that she was uniquely qualified to fulfill. Heck, you might even want to check out my mildly disparaging three-part analysis of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey from last year's May Mastery, the game which leads directly into Dreamfall Chapters (albeit with an eight year gap between the two releases).Īt the end of Book 4, Zoe had crossed back over into Stark after accepting an aspect of the "First Dreamer" into her soul. If you're new to this feature, I'd recommend starting with the first three Books that I covered in Day 18, Day 19 and Day 20 of last month's May Mastery feature and the Snooze Button recap of Book 4 that I covered a few days ago (as of writing). I'll quickly recap the end of Book 4 to make sure we know where we're at before I start on Book 5. The one case where you had to walk Kian to an unknown part of Marcuria to continue the story was excruciating enough, so based on that it's clear to me why this was Book 5's only and final instance of the kind of puzzle that had dominated the earlier Books. This Book was about giving all the TLJ fans out there exactly what they wanted and needed from a finale - one that many of them have waited years to see - and I'd suppose that the developers didn't want to keep them in suspense with any more distracting puzzles to solve. So like before there's not a whole of "gameplay" this time around as a result: no novel twist on the adventure game puzzles we've seen before in earlier Books nor any big surprises beyond those passively delivered by the narrative, which as I stated has pretty much taken the wheel for this final hurrah. The game spent the last Book, Book 4: Revelations, setting up all its dominoes for the culmination of years of lore, and spent this Book, Redux, knocking them all down in the precise order they were meant to fall. We are getting ahead of ourselves, though. In many ways, the final Book of this episodic resurrection of The Longest Journey has done just that it reaches a denouement of sorts for all its characters, puts almost all its cards on the table for us to see, settles long-standing mysteries that have been around since April Ryan's adventures way back in 1999's The Longest Journey and ends on a note somehow both final and open-ended, depending on whether we're talking about the characters featured in these games or the TLJ multiverse on a larger scale. Like Book 4, the classic adventure game puzzles take a back seat to delivering a lot of narrative exposition to the proponents of this series who have been aching for it since Dreamfall Chapters first made clear its intent to bring the overarching storyline of Ragnar Tornquist's decades-spanning adventure game series to a satisfactory conclusion. If I had to summarize Book 5 of Dreamfall Chapters in two words, rather than the several thousand to follow, it'd be "answers" and "catharsis".
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