Dreamfall Chapters (Norwegian: Drømmefall Kapitler) is an episodic 3D adventure game with emphasis on character interaction, exploration of the game world, and puzzle solving. It is a sequel to the adventure games The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The game was released for PC in five episodes between 21 October 2014 and 17 June 2016. The updated "Final Cut" version was released on physical media for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 5 May 2017, and the Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux versions on 21 July 2017.
The Longest Journey series is set in two parallel universes: Stark, a cyberpunk future Earth, and Arcadia, its magical fantasy counterpart. Chapters takes place in 2220 CE and continues the story of Dreamfall, whose protagonist Zoë Castillo had uncovered a criminal conspiracy that aimed to enslave both Stark and Arcadia by stealing their residents' dreams. Although Zoë managed to disrupt the conspirators' plans, she was betrayed and left in a coma at the end of Dreamfall, and has to find her purpose in life again in Chapters. The writers described the narrative theme of the game as "chapters of life".
Dreamfall Chapters was developed by Red Thread Games, an independent studio founded by Ragnar Tørnquist, who wrote and directed the previous two games. Funcom, the owners of The Longest Journey IP, had licensed the rights to develop the next installment out to Tørnquist's studio. Its development was crowd-funded by a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $1.5 million, with additional funding provided by the Norwegian Film Institute. The publisher Deep Silver released the game on consoles in 2017 to mixed reviews.
Gameplay
Dreamfall Chapters was originally developed on the Unity 4 game engine, but was retroactively upgraded to Unity 5 before the release of Book Four. It features large 3D environments, as opposed to 2D backgrounds in The Longest Journey and smaller 3D locations in Dreamfall. While not a completely open world, the game contains several free-roaming exploration levels, such as Europolis and Marcuria, and rewards players for exploring the levels and finding secrets. The locations themselves change slightly as the story progresses to reflect the passage of time.
The player steers playable characters from over-the-shoulder third-person view, using the WASD keys and mouselook. Interactive characters and objects are highlighted on the screen, allowing the player to interact with them using the mouse and context menus. While the game supports game controllers, it was optimized for the PC. The gameplay focus is on the exploration of the environments and the story and on solving puzzles. Dialogue with NPCs and dialogue puzzles comprise about half of the gameplay time. The on-screen interface is hidden by default to improve the immersion. There is no combat or stealth gameplay in Dreamfall Chapters.
Although the game features a linear plot with a set outcome, the players have to make many choices throughout the game that have far-reaching impact on the later story events (but not the ending). An optional, online-only "social" feature allows players to discover (either before, or after making the choice) which options other players (and their Facebook friends in particular) picked in these situations. These statistics are stored in a shared global database for all platforms. The game additionally displays a special "The balance has shifted" icon to warn players before plot-relevant choices, even when playing offline. An in-game journal, akin to April Ryan's diary in TLJ, keeps track of the recent plot developments.
Chapters includes a recap of the previous games to ease the new players into the story. At the time of the Kickstarter campaign, the developers planned for it to become the final game in what they called "the Dreamer Cycle", but not in The Longest Journey series as a whole. This had changed during development, however, and Book Five was presented as the conclusion to the entire saga upon release.
Plot
In the mythology of the series, Earth is one of countless worlds in the multiverse, created from the primordial Storytime by the dreaming of a being known as Lux, the First Dreamer. Earth, or "Stark" as it is known in the game, is a world of science existing in Balance with its "Twin World" of magic, Arcadia, split off and separated from it by the impassable Divide twelve millennia ago. The game takes place in 2220 CE by Stark's reckoning, and its chief antagonist is Brian Westhouse, a Starkian trapped in Arcadia, who plans to return home by forcibly reuniting the Twin Worlds with the power of the Undreaming, the destructive counterpart to Lux. To strengthen the Undreaming with dream energy, Westhouse, as "the Prophet", had conspired with the corrupt officials of the Azadi Empire in Arcadia and an ambitious Starkian scientist Helena Chang to build a giant dream-storing Engine in the recently conquered Arcadian city-state of Marcuria and to imbue it with the dream energy stolen from Stark by Chang's lucid dream-inducing invention, the "Dreamachines". Chang had also secretly planned to instead use the stolen dream energy to reshape reality itself with the help of her genetically engineered "Dreamers", i.e. humans with powers equal to Lux. She had deemed her first artificial Dreamer a failure, however, and the girl was instead raised by Chang's partner Gabriel Castillo as his own daughter, Zoë.
In Dreamfall, a 20-year-old Zoë had learned that Chang's sponsors, the Japan-based megacorporation WatiCorp, planned to brainwash Dreamachine users in a bid for world domination, but after failing to stop them, she was put into a coma by Chang. At the same time in Arcadia, an elite Azadi operative Kian Alvane investigated the corruption in Marcuria but was charged with high treason and imprisoned. In Chapters, their stories finally converge in Book Five, where they also tie in with the arc of the third playable character, Saga, which, until then, is mainly told in the Interludes.
