The Longest Journey

Really memorable and engaging. Mature and well developed narrative with a strong female protagonist. Just great.

Top badass moment? Taking nearly four years to complete it - I cheated a lot too. A sex-mad bird, a lot of waffle about The Balance and an underwhelming ‘handbags at dawn’ final confrontation. I grew quite fond of myself as the drainpipe-thin April (eat some cake for God's sake), although by the end I was beginning to feel our relationship had run its course. Luckily, as the game goes on there are less and less puzzles to solve and more cut scenes to watch. No cats, chainsaws or decapitations.

I thought being so well-regarded this might be free of the typical issues with point and click adventure games but it was full of them. I think I might just hate the genre. The story is a really corny magical realist thing full of inscrutable and irrelevant lore dumps about magical stones and amulets. Of course this game widely praised for its story which just goes to show once again how low the standards for stories in games are.

I'm not the biggest point-and-click fan, and this falls into some of the pitfalls of what turns me off them (primarily unobvious or illogical interactions required to proceed), but the setting is intriguing and the plot captivating enough. The voice acting varies quite wildly from pretty good to seriously bad, but at least the main role is voiced the best.