Dreamfall: The Longest Journey is, first and foremost, a great work of science fiction. Such a complex plot, endearing characters, and imaginative settings and situations are highly uncommon to gaming, or any medium for that matter. Those familiar with the game's predecessor might expect no less, since it's widely considered one of the best adventure games ever made. Judged as a follow-up to a beloved classic, Dreamfall does not disappoint, for the most part. It exhibits the unique attention to detail and terrific presentation that made The Longest Journey so remarkable for its time. But Dreamfall also does an excellent job drawing in new players as well as those fans patiently awaiting this sequel. The actual gameplay is a blend of action adventure conventions, but it clearly isn't the main draw. It's there to help make the story more engaging, and that's more or less what it does. Yet, as impressive as the story is, it ends too quickly to leave you feeling fully satisfied when you finally reach the game's bewildering, enlightening, frustrating, thought-provoking conclusion. Is the journey itself worth your while, though? Absolutely, yes.

Adventure gamers like to get all nostalgic, and can you blame them? The point-and-click era passed into gaming history more than a little while ago. If asked, many of them will point to The Longest Journey as the genre's swan song. That was six years ago, a time when the recommended system was a 266MHz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM. In picking back up the series -- a sequel of sorts -- the goal was to embrace the advancements since then and with them evolve the form of the adventure game. But natural selection is as hard at work in the videogame environment as anywhere else and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey finds itself right back at the top of the endangered species list.

A number of issues put it there, but none so conspicuous as the very fact that it struggles to even be a game. Throughout its entirety, the bulk of the gameplay involves ferrying whichever character you happen to be playing to the next event, and then watching it play out. And while to some degree that's always been the nature of adventures, the cinematics are typically the carrot rewarded for getting past some obstacle. But in Dreamfall, much of the time all that's asked of you is to control moving your character from one place to another; that's it -- not too challenging that. Neither is it very reward worthy.