7 - The Longest Journey
I’ve always felt some kind of sympathy for Point n’ Click adventures, but I haven’t played a lot of them. A friend borrowed me Monkey Island 2, and I loved it, but had to return it before beating it and never found time to go back to it. Strategy games used to take all my PC gaming time (now that time has been taken by life in general). Anyway, The Longest Journey is the only PnC Adventure I’ve fully beaten, but what a great one!
The story, filled with a great sense of humor and charismatic characters (April, Cortez and, specially, Crow!), bring us to a world that has been divided between two dimensions: the technological and industrial Stark (that would be our own world in the future) and the magic Arcadia: both were separated and now somebody is trying to reunite the dimensions again (what would destroy them). April, our character, has the power of travelling between both worlds, and has to find a mysterious character that is the only one that can save the worlds from disaster. I found the story not only very entertaining, but also significantly “mature” for the medium: with a clever writing that many times makes a delicious satire of our own current world – in the best tradition of comical fantastic & science-fiction literature from Cervantes and Jonathan Swift to Stanislaw Lem and Douglas Adams. World construction in TLJ is also perfect, making use of the two different settings (futuristic science-fiction and medieval fantasy) to create rich worlds that appear to have its own life and History outside the game.
It’s a bit strange that a game so different of the rest of the list (the Point&Click adventure and one of the few story-driven games) has reached so high in my list, but this game makes so many things right that it certainly deserved to be in my top ten.
