Senaste recensioner av Urosh Auberon

My playtime on Steam will be minimal cause I used ScummVM to play this game. Steam build lacks the Fonts and when I include the Fonts from the GOG version of the game (or the demo) all the fonts on my OS break until I reboot my PC. Steam build also suffers from a white popup screen when you want to close the game.
That's apparently fixed in the beta branch of the game but I didn't play around with that. Now on to the actual game review.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: Chapters are two games that I loved very much when I played them originally but I never played the The Longest Journey.

This year I finally decided to give it a shot and tonight I finished TLJ for the first time in my life. Even though TLJ is, currently, almost 25 years old I can definitely see why this game is considered the best adventure game of all time by some people. Visually the character models aged poorly, but the background, the voice acting and the story itself are so immersive and memorable. I had Clive Barker's Imajica vibes playing through story, of course without dark themes that Clive Barker is known for. There are dark themes in TLJ too, but not on Barker level.

TLJ is one of those games where I am not sure if I finished the game or if the game finished me now that I am done.

I also learned that there was supposed to be a direct sequel that bridges the gap between TLJ and Dreamfall: TLJ called The Longest Journey Home but based on a Twitter post from the creator in 2016 it'll likely never happen. And that makes me very sad.

Had to use a walkthrough only once. I was afraid the game would be full of moon logic puzzles, but surprisingly I don't think there were any. Even the one time I had to use a guide was simply because I didn't figure out I needed to get an item from the police station. Everything else was either logical to me or simply solved through a brief trial and error method.

Also tried the HD mod but I quickly uninstalled it. As I said the character models aged poorly and mostly look very blurry. But the HD mod, in my opinion, just makes things worse. It's like all character models went through the Photoshop's "Sharpen" tool over and over and over again. And the end result is just... wrong.... to my eyes.

EDIT: Gonna have to change my original review to negative because I just learned that apparently the publisher (Ziggurat) didn't have the rights to publish this game on digital platforms. The original creator, who is still the holder of the IP, did not agree to this and is gearing up to take legal action.

Gonna recommend this simply because I have nostalgia for it.
But I expected more from the Steam re-release. They only slapped DgVoodoo on top of the original game and called it a day.

The 13th Level DLC is not included either, you have to get it from PCGW.

At least it's cheap I suppose.

This reminds me of Glean from way back during the Flash game era. And that a good thing because I adore that series.
From time to time I need to scratch that itch of a relaxing mining game. No enemies, no stress, just mining. And this game delivered.

My feedback on how to make this game better and more enjoyable:
1. Allow the players to mine things that are above us or at least to mine left/right during a jump or gliding. It's so annoying when you want to get something above you so you have to circle back and dig a tunnel from above instead of just mine one cube above you.
2. Drilling speed is very slow, even when you have the best mech fully upgraded in combination with boosters things are very slow. I just want thing to be faster.
3. Remove the timer on the Teleporter. Why is it even there? If I want to spam it, let me spam it. I'm the one purchasing it from the shop anyway.
4. Speaking of the shop, remove the silly limit of 5 for bombs/dynamite. It really serves no purpose to have these things limited. If I want to blow stuff up, let me do it.
5. Add a feature of auto/farm bots or something of the sort. I would love to have little automatons who drill the ground slowly. Gradually starting from the first layer and going downwards as they progress. That would be especially cool as I am drilling in the deeper levels to have them do stuff in the earlier part of the map which I will probably never go back to myself. Just clear some space you know.

If you crave more Mining Mechs, then this is the perfect DLC for you.
If you had your itch scratches from the base game, then you don't really need this.

A bit janky here and there but overall a pretty fun game with a friend or two. Hopefully more maps will get added in the future!

This was so nostalgic! Loved it very much!

Pros:
You can run
You can use number keys to instantly select items

Cons:
A very buggy game
- Mine cart level has an issue where you can fall through the cart and get stuck in the floor. Restarting the level is the only solution
- Level 15 has a huge problem with those tetris looking thingies that you need to rotate to solve the puzzle. Their hitbox is so broken that in most cases they refuse to rotate unless you click on the exact pixel. Tried changing FPS, toggling Vsync, changing resolution. No luck. The only solution was to click and swipe over and over again until they decide to move.
- Level 16 the secret note under the wheel on the ship simply can't be picked up.
Certain graphical issues where you can see through walls and floors because they don't merge properly making a gap into the out of bounds section.
Just like in the previous game, you can click on already completed puzzle doors and the game will zoom in on nothing.


All in all, if you want to play Faraway games, just play them on mobile. They were not made for PC and this is just so lazily stitched together.
The dev never goes back to fix issues that have been reported. The first game STILL has a game breaking glitch where the solution you see in the game doesn't work, the one from the mobile version of the game does, but you don't get those clues.

I love the GemCraft series. Countless hours spent playing them here and on Kongregate back in the day.
Hopefully one day we'll get a new one after Frostborn Wrath cause I simply want more!

Played this for many hours on Kongregate. Glad to see it's on Steam now as well!
Save importing from the browser version works too!

Unlike the previous game, this one thankfully doesn't have a game breaking bug with one of the puzzles. The solution is the one from the mobile version instead of what the puzzle shows on the PC version. And that STILL hasn't been fixed in the original game.

With that being said, there's a lot of jank present here. So many objects that you can clip through, a zipline i one of the levels can be used without even getting the handle for it, doors that vanish once you unlock them can still be interacted with even though they are gone etc etc.

Originally played the first game in its demo form back on Kongregate and then on mobile. Positive review only cause of nostalgia.