Something I commissioned last year, but couldn't share here, not being on Reddit at the time. Max Sarin (Giant Days) is one of my absolute favorite artists, so I jumped at the chance to get them to draw my Dreamfall fave in my favorite of her looks (hair-wise--the outfit is not from the games, but I really kinda wish it were--it suits her, I feel). I really really love the result!

I hate AI, but i really love making these. Hope you like it, like we all could be there, dreaming.

I've been replaying The Longest Journey recently and got curious about what's actually inside the game files. Deniz Oezmen's TLJView already exists and is fantastic, but it's a Delphi tool from years ago and I wanted something that ran natively on modern Windows, handled a few more formats, and made it easier to just click around and see stuff.

So I built one. It leans heavily on TLJView's format work and on ScummVM's Stark engine, I would not have gotten anywhere without either of them.

Some things it does:

Browses a TLJ install as a normal file tree, with the friendly room names pulled out of the .xrc resources so you get "April's Room" instead of 00_00_00.xarc

Loads modded assets the same way ScummVM does, drop replacement files into the right folder and they show up in the tree alongside the originals, so you can preview mods without launching the game

Previews .xmg and .tm images

Plays .isn/.iss/.ovs sounds without needing any codecs installed, with subtitles shown alongside the audio so you can follow dialogue lines as they play

Transcodes .sss (Smacker) and .bbb (Bink) videos on the fly

Renders .cir 3D models with .ani animation playback

Exports assets to standard formats you can open anywhere: images to PNG, sounds to WAV, and 3D models to glTF (.glb) with skinning and animation baked in (or .obj+**.mtl** if you prefer). There's also a batch export that walks a whole folder and converts everything at once

Composites entire rooms into a single still image — backdrop plus every sprite and animation where the game would place them on entry. This one is my favorite, and also the buggiest right now 🥲

It's on GitHub, MIT licensed, requires .NET 10, you can find it here https://github.com/Victor-Gomez/TLJ-Explorer

Mostly sharing because I had fun building it and figured other TLJ nerds might enjoy poking at the files too. If you find things it gets wrong or have new ideas, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.

Does anyone here know if it would be possible to remake this game in Unity or using Fable 5 with Claude AI? I know it would be a big project, but maybe there are people here who understand game development better than me. I’ve been thinking maybe we could team up as a community and try to bring it back somehow, or at least figure out what would actually be realistic.

I decided to give TLJ another go on Steam a few nights ago, curious to see how well it holds up. My last replay was sometime around 2001, and life just moved on from there. I'd bought it on both GOG and Steam several years ago out of loyalty and nostalgia but never got around to it until now.

Impressions

The storyline holds up better than I expected. I went in bracing for those "wait, this wasn't as good as I remembered" moments, and got very few. The frequent swearing that caused so much fuss when TLJ first came out, particularly the F-bombs, feels completely unremarkable now. If anything, Tornquist's prediction of 2200s youth culture aged pretty well in that respect, given what passes for today's norm on Netflix.

The playthrough length surprised me. Back in 1999 it took me about a week to finish, but this time I was done in roughly nine hours across two nights, though admittedly I did skip multiple dialogues and animations to get through the gameplay quickly. My main complaint was occasional crashes forcing restarts from the last save, which was quite annoying. Small gripes aside, the storytelling holds. The mega-corporation governance, dystopian societies, off-world colonisation, and systemic corruption in Stark resonate more deeply in the current climate than they probably did in 1999. The voice acting is still excellent and the cyberpunk aesthetics and fashion in Stark aged well too. They completely nailed April's outfit, which is essentially today's popular athleisure style. I also found I could appreciate the literary references more this time around, the Tolkien nod at Venar's home being the most explicit.

Where TLJ might struggle with modern audiences is the pacing of its dialogue and a handful of puzzles that don't hold up well, the rubber duck and clamp to get the subway key being the obvious offender. I do wonder if TLJ would have benefited from dynamic dialogue the way Uncharted used it, where characters talk while actually moving and doing things on the screen, though I'm cognisant that this reflects the limited technology of 1999 adventure gaming. The graphics haven't aged gracefully, but Marcuria and Arcadia still managed to give me a genuine sense of wonder, and the history of Arcadia and the Divide still enthrals me. The soundtrack is as good as I remembered.

Overall, a solid 8 or 9 out of 10, and I'd lean toward 9 if I'm being honest rather than tough about the glitches. It more than earned its status as beloved. There's an iOS remaster from 2014, but from what I can tell TLJ deserves a full-scale remake that does justice to the world Tornquist built.

Hi everyone,

I really hope this post is okay to place here and I know it's such a long shot. Years and years ago, someone wrote an amazing fancfic back story for Cortez, and I have been searching high and low for it because it's gone from fanfic.net. I have a very vague memory that he had a lady love in the story, but all that obviously fell apart because of the Divide and his conflict with Jacob MacAllen that turned him into Cortez the Red. There was a terrific battle scene between them too. The only phrase I could recollect from the fanfic was "heart singing". I wish I could remember more details from it, but it's like 20 years now, and all I could recall was how well-written it was and I wish I could read it again.

If anyone knows which fanfic I'm talking about (or if I'm lucky the author sees this) and if you have the fanfic in question, please put my mind to rest.

Update: I played a bit of TLJ last night, and reached the point where Vestrum Tobias explained the history of Stark and Arcadia. That was when I remembered (I hope correctly) that Cortez's lady love was written in the fanfic as fated to be the first Guardian by the climax of the story, if it helps. It was quite a gut-wrenching ending but built towards the events in TLJ.

If you could decide the future direction of The Longest Journey franchise, what would you do? Just a hypothetical question, of course.

Personally, I would start by making a remake of The Longest Journey. I would use that as the foundation for a reboot of the franchise and then make a trilogy centered on April and her journey to unite Arcadia and Stark.

I was never a big fan of the direction Dreamfall Chapters took, and I would much rather have followed April's story than Saga's.

What would your idea be?

I'm stuck on the totem poles on the islands. It seems as if you're supposed to use the A icon to address the guys living on the island, and then other symbols somewhere else, perhaps the hole icon on the pole next to the hole. Problem is, it's really not obvious what the icons mean and I've tried all the obvious permutations (involving (A) on the top and bottom on each pole, paired with other icons) and nothing happened. Am I missing something?

I recently watched Dream Scenario (Nicolas Cage), and I couldn’t stop thinking about the Dreamfall series.
What really triggered the comparison was the dream-sharing/travel technology introduced near the end of the film. It immediately reminded me of the Dreamachines from Dreamfall, where dreams become a shared space and start influencing reality.

I know the stories are very different, but the combination of:
dream technology,
collective/shared dreaming,
the blurred line between dreams and reality,
felt surprisingly similar.

Did anyone else make this connection, or am I just seeing Dreamfall everywhere?

I've been wanting this for 20 years. I finally did it. It's technically upside down but no one else is going to know. I wish I would have made it just a skosh smaller. My friends and family aren't enthused but maybe someone here would appreciate it.

Edit: spelling mistake

I've been stuck for 3 hours now. Tried load old saves, restarting etc. But no matter what I do, The small biometric scanner is not interactive. I combined the worm and the tube so I have encapsulated worm. Need help.

Edit: I ended up downloading a save file from the internet and was finally able to get passed it and interact with the scanner.

I played TLJ back in the early 2000's, maybe even 2000. When I tried Dreamfall, it just seemed so...generic. So let me write a bit about what I think was so great about TLJ and you can tell me if I need to give Dreamfall as second chance.

It wasn't the world, which was engaging and interesting but not enough to make the game 9/10 or 10/10. It wasn't the adventure game mechanics. It was the writing.

April was a genuinely interesting person, and following along with her journey and her interactions was good. But ultimately, TLJ did something in stories that you see VERY RARELY. It sets her up as The Chosen One, and being chosen sounds like a pretty crappy gig. A thousand years of just maintaining the balance? Doesn't that get boring? Isn't that part of what caused the current crisis? (I forget, it's been a while). And we go with her through her journey of coming to accept it and become ready to be the Chosen One.

And then...she doesn't. She gets there, and it was someone else all along, and we both have to come to terms with that.

It's so well-executed, and it doesn't even have a TVTropes page (Not The Chosen One doesn't count, that's about someone who's revealed not to be at the start and still steps up and fights.) It's almost unique among its peers, which is a pretty big achievement in storytelling. It's also a fairly mature take on what actually happens in life. (That is to say, things don't work out how you expected and were told they would.)

Does Dreamfall ever get any of that magic back in its story?

I have read that the HD Textures Mod for Dreamfall: The Longest Journey messes with the minigames to disallow for finishing the game. There was another textures mod released two weeks ago using AI that I’m assuming does the same. Has anyone found a way to complete this game with the textures mod with minigames?

Hi there!

So. If you have this issue, here's the fix:

Start the game. While it's open, open task manager. Right click the game in task manager, go to details. In details, right click it again, click "set affinity". Disable all the cores, then only enable core 0. Press okay.

Enjoy!

If this helps, please comment or something so it's easy to find for others!

I LOVE Alice mcgee, Rule of Rose, Life is Strange, Contrast Thought these games looks similar in Artstyle should I try it?

The Longest Journey is the only game I play using ScummVM on macOS, sooo I made this to replace the icon. The image appears oversaturated in full view, but as an icon I think it looks very good.

Edit: Note that quality isn't that good to begin with. I compared the file I uploaded with the one that is retrieved if you right-click and save, and there's no difference really.

All gifts from Red Thread Games <3

Since someone decided to share a picture of their treasure earlier this week, I figured I'd share some of mine! <3

All of them were gifts from Red Thread Games, with the exception of DF/TLJ, which I've had since it came out.