People should be frankly ashamed of the placement of The Longest Journey. That game is mediocre at best, and certainly not better than Sam & Max Hit the Road let alone the sixth greatest adventure game of all time.
Respectfully disagree. TLJ is great in both scale and ambition. It is one of the few adventure games that makes you feel like you live in these words. As ridiculous as it sounds, the conversations were so long that they felt real, and the locations were so many and so diverse that you felt like you were really there, doing the stuff that you would realistically be doing in April's shoes. Not to mention the voice actress for April being so good.
TLJ really built the world(s) it is set in, and I don't think there is an adventure of this scale when it comes to length, locations, dialogues, diversity, even if there are better written ones or ones with better puzzles.
It's been ages since I played TLJ, and my initially fairly positive view of the game is definitely colored by my intense dislike of Dreamfall. And I concede that the game does have a very ambitious scope along every dimension except puzzle depth -- a huge geographic scope (including a very large number of rooms) with a huge cast of (for an adventure game) well-developed characters. The world has a lot of lore to it (again, much more than in a typical adventure), and it is unusual in having a serious plot rather than being comedic. I wouldn't say it is a
bad adventure game, but I don't think it's a particularly good one. Again, perhaps my memory is wrong, but here's what stands out in my recollection:
* "doing the stuff that you would realistically be doing in April's shoes" -- Exactly the opposite reaction. Because the game is grounded in an ostensibly serious, real-world setting, the absence of straightforward puzzle solutions and the presence of truly zany puzzle solutions stands out all the more. We don't need to go to the rubber duck example. The first real puzzle in the game is a crazy electrical puzzle where you use an heirloom ring as a conductor and futz around risking electrocution rather than taking any of a million more reasonable steps. The game rules out maybe twenty reasonable options, but not the other eighty. I say this as someone who conducts his life in a very adventure-gamey way (once dealt with a wasp nest by building a 15-foot-hafted PVC "hammer" with the T junction tip wadded with ammonia soaked paper towels, having girded my body with socks on my hands and a balaclava mask; once fixed a keyboard by weaving a rubber band through its underbody to hold a broken key in place, etc.).
* The game is very long, but the length is overwhelmingly (1) completely gameplay-free dialogue (i.e., dialogue where the only thing you do is click "continue" or go sequentially through dialogue topics until they're all exhausted) and (2) backtracking at a fairly slow movement speed because the game deliberately sets locks and keys far apart and makes you ping pong back and forth between them. Thus, what I consider to be the essence of adventure games -- the player's deliberate engagement with the obstacles in the game using a variety of verbs and tools -- is a very small minority of the game, particularly in comparison to the other adventure games on the Codex's list.
* Many of the characters and scenarios are not especially creative or well-realized; the whole tech/fantasy worlds hanging in the balance has been done better previously by other authors, the beautiful bohemian types who are the game's heroes are not very interesting to me as a heroes (or even as beauties or bohemians).
Ultimately, there is a roughly contemporaneous game that IMO "matches up" well against TLJ: Grim Fandango. It also involves a huge world with many characters, a great deal of dialogue, and a variety of settings. It has a rich lore and interesting bestiary of fantastical creatures that serves as a kind of strange reflection of the real world. But GF utterly crushes TLJ. Its puzzles aren't spectacular, but they are
much better than TLJ's. Its setting is vastly more creative (and more interesting); its characters are, ironically, much more human. Manny is a much more likable protagonist. The story has a propulsive forward force to it that TLJ's lacks. The visuals hold up much better. TLJ's were lovely at the time, but now look like any generic fantasy 3D art -- there's no sense of a unique artist (or vision) behind the game.
"Mediocre at best" was probably too harsh, but it's a game I have no real interest in replaying. It sits around the same level as Dragonsphere in my recollection: it was a satisfying serious fantasy at a time when I was into mediocre serious fantasy of all stripes, but it has nothing meaningful to teach about writing, puzzle design, world building, etc. It doesn't even have the memorable twist of Dragonsphere!
