Grim Fandango and Neverhood Fans will be sorely disappointed

Grim Fandango and Neverhood fans will be sorely disappointed

Two games I enjoyed immensely in the past were “The Neverhood Chronicles” (NHC) and “Grim Fandango” (GF). The first was backed by Dreamworks Studios and the second by Lucas Arts. That was over a decade ago and ever since I’ve been looking for point-and-click adventure games as good as either of them.

After reading the reviews for The Longest Journey I decided to give it a shot and plonked down my cash and time to buy a copy. I also gave it the benefit of the doubt and invested about 5 hours of game play into it. In comparison, it only took me 10 minutes to get thoroughly engrossed in GF and about 2 minutes to lose myself in NHC.

I’m now in Chapter 2 of the game, but I doubt I’ll get much farther because I’m most likely giving up at this point. This game pales in comparison to either of the two games I cited above and if you’re like me, you’ll be wishing you could get back your hours of playing it - I’d much rather have replayed The Neverhood Chronicles or Grim Fandango a second time instead.

To be fair - both NHC and GF were developed by major studios - but the fact of the matter is that it shows in the quality of their final products - They have strong hooks, and memorable multidimensional characters. You are drawn into the story early on, and the dialogs (or scenes) are short, witty, pithy and entertaining. They show that considerable work had gone into the production - almost as good as a feature film in which anything less than excellent was edited out! Even the graphics were amazing in these games.

OTOH, I find TLJ to be severely wanting in all of these areas - the dialog is highly stilted, conversations are long-winded and boring, what humor the author has tried to inject often looks contrived and unnatural. On top of that, the graphics are quite poor and the set pieces leave much to be desired by way of building a lasting impression. Very amateurish.

I doubt if I’ll find the time or commitment to plow through the rest of this tedious story. But I’m happy to be convinced otherwise.

Of course, to be utterly fair - I’m not forgetting that both NHC and GF had big bucks and big names backing them. I’m sure George Lucas and Spielberg spared no effort or expense in ensuring the high quality of their deliverables, a luxury that was probably not available to the authors/developers of TLJ - Therefore, my review is not a reflection of the abilities and talents of the developers and authors of TLJ, but only of the quality of the finished product - which ultimately ought to compete on its own merit in an arena where products at least an order of magnitude better are available.

BTW, I did go ahead and invest in the sequel to the Neverhood Chronicles (Armikrog) - so I’m looking forward to spending many happy hours of playing that game when it comes out on Sep 8, 2015.

I hope this review helps you in making your decision regarding where to spend your hard earned free-time.

Cheers.

Amanda 1975 about The Longest Journey Remastered