Snooze Button: Dreamfall Chapters: Book 5: Redux

If I had to summarize Book 5 of Dreamfall Chapters in two words, rather than the several thousand to follow, it'd be "answers" and "catharsis". Like Book 4, the classic adventure game puzzles take a back seat to delivering a lot of narrative exposition to the proponents of this series who have been aching for it since Dreamfall Chapters first made clear its intent to bring the overarching storyline of Ragnar Tornquist's decades-spanning adventure game series to a satisfactory conclusion. In many ways, the final Book of this episodic resurrection of The Longest Journey has done just that; it reaches a denouement of sorts for all its characters, puts almost all its cards on the table for us to see, settles long-standing mysteries that have been around since April Ryan's adventures way back in 1999's The Longest Journey and ends on a note somehow both final and open-ended, depending on whether we're talking about the characters featured in these games or the TLJ multiverse on a larger scale.

We are getting ahead of ourselves, though. The game spent the last Book, Book 4: Revelations, setting up all its dominoes for the culmination of years of lore, and spent this Book, Redux, knocking them all down in the precise order they were meant to fall. So like before there's not a whole of "gameplay" this time around as a result: no novel twist on the adventure game puzzles we've seen before in earlier Books nor any big surprises beyond those passively delivered by the narrative, which as I stated has pretty much taken the wheel for this final hurrah. This Book was about giving all the TLJ fans out there exactly what they wanted and needed from a finale - one that many of them have waited years to see - and I'd suppose that the developers didn't want to keep them in suspense with any more distracting puzzles to solve. The one case where you had to walk Kian to an unknown part of Marcuria to continue the story was excruciating enough, so based on that it's clear to me why this was Book 5's only and final instance of the kind of puzzle that had dominated the earlier Books.

I'll quickly recap the end of Book 4 to make sure we know where we're at before I start on Book 5. If you're new to this feature, I'd recommend starting with the first three Books that I covered in Day 18, Day 19 and Day 20 of last month's May Mastery feature and the Snooze Button recap of Book 4 that I covered a few days ago (as of writing). Heck, you might even want to check out my mildly disparaging three-part analysis of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey from last year's May Mastery, the game which leads directly into Dreamfall Chapters (albeit with an eight year gap between the two releases).

At the end of Book 4, Zoe had crossed back over into Stark after accepting an aspect of the "First Dreamer" into her soul. Before leaving, she bid farewell to Crow and mentioned something about her destiny as the "Dreamer"; a metaphysical role regarding the multiverse that she was uniquely qualified to fulfill. Crow, on his part, decided to look for Kian Alvane back in Marcuria. With Kian, we had uncovered the mass genocide and experimentation of the magical races on the prison island of Ge'en and had revealed all this to General Hami, the man who raised Kian as an ethical warrior, as the Book concluded. Last, but not least, we saw a teenage Saga leave her house between worlds for possibly the last time to go explore the multiverse via paths only she could find. She clearly had some part yet to play in the struggles on Stark and Arcadia, but what could they be?

Book 5: Redux

(The recap that follows is largely for the benefit of anyone trying to follow the plot, including myself, to help make sense of the events that occur and their significance. That means there's an immense number of spoilers here for passive readers of this blog - not only for Book 5 but for the entire series as a whole. You have been warned! If you just want to know whether or not the game's for you, or the level of quality of this Book in particular, be sure to to skip to "The Bit at the End".)

The Book begins as the last ended, with a shot of Zoe waking up from a coma on a familiar hospital bed. Turns out this room is a facsimile; a virtual representation of Zoe's hospital room from the beginning of the first Book. Her old purple buddy Wonkers was there, but nothing felt right, and it soon became evident why: the memories placed all around her bed in the form of get well soon cards and photographs were partially fabricated. All these keepsakes occurred before she woke up the first time, moved to Propast with Reza and hopped over to Arcadia for the events of the previous Book. They also made up memories to fill that gap: going on vacation with Reza, graduating university, pretending her friend Liv was still alive. By observing these memories closely, the simulation begins to break down and reveals that not only is Zoe in a high-tech observation room similar to the one that held Faith - the mysterious little girl of Dreamfall: TLJ that guided Zoe - but that the room was in a subterranean laboratory run by JIVA: the bioengineering company that belongs to Zoe's absent mother Helena. We also saw that Zoe's gone through some changes too: she's been shaved bald, stuck in a skintight plug suit and covered in various electronic devices for an as yet unclear purpose.

The game then switches back to Alvane at this point. The Book gives us our first decision: what to do with the villainous Sister Alessandra who ran Ge'en and experimented on so many magicals. Since there's no more waiting around for future Books to see our repercussions, it was simply of choice of sending her back home to Sadir for a fair trial - one that would almost certainly be manipulated to protect the Prophet's secrets - or to kill her there, or hand her over to the prisoners for an even worse fate (my choice). Kian and Hami then head back to Marcuria to plan an assault to prevent the activation of the immense calculating Engine, which we now know is instrumental to the Prophet's plans to wipe out all magic in Arcadia. Hami gives a rousing speech to the Resistance about how magic is ingrained in every living creature in Arcadia, and the groups are split into three: Anna and Enu help the defecting engineer Ferdows to take control of the engine room in town, Hami leads the majority of the Resistance against the Azadi forces on the streets as a distraction while Kian infiltrates the Engine's heart within the Azadi tower alone.

Before Kian can find a way into the tower, he comes across Onor Hileriss attempting to incinerate a captured Crow. This is really the game's only major puzzle, and it involves first finding where this pyre is - you essentially wander by while heading through Marcuria's central park - and then figuring out how to save Crow from Onor's imminent ignition of the kindling. The goal is to find a nearby empty flagon, fill it with an explosive wine (I have no idea how the wine merchant didn't notice I switched his dainty wine-tasting thimble with the flagon) and use that on the kindling. Onor goes up in flames, but so does the pyre, and you quickly have to find a pitchfork to open Crow's cage and free him before he starts smelling delicious. The one interesting thing about this puzzle is that it gives you a red herring that's easy to fall for: there's a nearby birdbath you can use to fill up the flagon instead, which can be poured on the kindling to make it too damp to light, but Onor simply lights the pyre directly instead if you do this. You can also drink the flagon of birdbath water, if you want to see Kian curse the stupidity of drinking something with bird poop in it.

Crow tells Kian that he knows a way into the Tower: it's through the forgotten underground city beneath The Journeyman Inn that both Zoe and April have passed through at various points, which leads to the eerie Well of Dreams that was filled with blue energy the last time we came by as Zoe. It's this Well that the Engine and the Azadi Tower are tapping into, and is directly powering a means to merge the two worlds together through everyone's dream energy and that of Storytime - the interdimensional primordial source of all reality that Zoe was briefly trapped inside. Kian sneaks to the central level where he meets Roper Klacks - we see in a brief scene that he's working for the Prophet, and is the mastermind of the Azadi Engine. The idea was given to him after his time trapped in April Ryan's calculator: a throwaway joke about a wizard being defeated by science that managed to become a monumentally important plot point. Kian sucker punches Klacks and gets to work sabotaging the Engine by remotely handing controls to Ferdows in the substation after following his directions via the speaking tubes, but before he and Crow can complete a two-person step to fully divert control they are interrupted... by Mother Utana. Kian's teacher tries to talk a confused Kian down, until Crow spills the beans that he's been doing oddjobs for the head of the Azadi Scientific Advancement Whoosit (I neglected to write this down, but it's the division of the Azadi government that Sister Alessandra was working for in creating an anti-magical virus), who happens to be Mother Utana. Utana, realizing that Kian might need more than a little convincing, stabs him in the gut and leaves him to bleed out in front of the Engine. At this point the Prophet appears and breaks Crow's neck, sending the beloved sidekick's corpse falling into the vortex of dream energy. So far, this sabotage mission isn't going so well.

Zoe's not faring that much better. The facility she's in is being raided by WATI soldiers; it appears WATI and JIVA aren't on speaking terms right now. Avoiding the exosuit guards, she discovers that she was fabricated in a laboratory - like Faith, and Hanna - to become someone who could tap into the dreaming world for its reality-changing powers. As her latent powers didn't manifest as a baby, she was to be cast aside by Helena until Gabriel gave up his stake in the project to raise her as his own daughter. Through Zoe, Helena intends to change the reality of Stark via Storytime for the better, eliminating death and disease and ensuring science and logic become the guiding principles of humanity. Helena explains this to Zoe herself, after she releases a gas that knocks out everyone in the facility - including Zoe's father Gabriel, who has been helping Helena for Zoe's sake - and placing Zoe inside a pod so that her supercomputer Eingana can use an unconscious Zoe's power to shape reality automatically to a pre-defined blueprint. What we also learn? Zoe has been in this Mumbai lab since Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, and the version we've been playing as this whole time is a perfect physical double that she used her dream powers to create. Helena's also been working with the Prophet all along, though she doesn't know the full extent of the Prophet's scheming, and tricked WATICorp into giving her the resources she needs for her supercomputer Eingana by producing for them the Dreamachine. WATI's been using the Dreamachines to brainwash everyone for profit, though Helena's true purpose for the device was to funnel everyone's dream energy to where she (and the Prophet) could use it. Helena, to her credit, has also been looking out for Zoe's safety - the enigmatic German agent Falk who saves Zoe's life was under her orders to protect her from WATI.

At this point, the game starts getting even more convoluted. Zoe wakes up in a spectral realm similar to Storytime, where she meets a non-plussed Crow. Crow's there to provide a guided tour through the memories of the Prophet, whom he managed to peck and taste his blood before the Prophet killed him. To no surprise to anyone, the Prophet is none other than Brian Westhouse, who was taken over by the Undreaming (the force of negation attempting to destroy all worlds) after his trip through the portal at the monastery, which we saw as the epilogue to Dreamfall: TLJ. Since then, Brian's been seeking a way home and drowning out the Undreaming and its own plans for destroying the world, and Brian determines that the best way to get back to Stark is to unite Arcadia and Stark into one world. To do THAT, he needs to eliminate all magic in Arcadia to better facilitate the merging of the two, hence the dream energies and the various plans to genocide the magical races. Using the scientifically-minded Azadi as his pawns, he's been running the show for decades. Before Zoe can wake back up, she bumps into the phantom of April Ryan. April and Crow then depart into the shadows on a poignant note, beginning their longest journey together.

We then switch back to Saga. Saga's much older now, a young woman, and well-versed in multi-planar travel. She's returned to the now abandoned house between worlds to collect some items required for a "prophecy" she has to fulfill. These include a spatula, a length of rope and an elixir of extended life, which the player needs to concoct by finding even more objects inside the house. Once done, she shifts to the innards of the Azadi engine, uses the objects she has to make her way through the gears, down onto the platform where Kian is dying and revive him with the elixir. Saga's fairly passive through all this - because she knows what is and what will be, she's passively dancing to the unseen puppetstrings to the mild bewilderment of everyone around her. After giving Kian precise instructions on how to stop Westhouse, her next step is to open a portal between Stark and Arcadia to assist Ferdows (who sneaked into the tower with Anna after Kian stopped responding to them via the speaking tubes) and Zoe (who managed to escape by manifesting her dream powers again, since the Eingana is weakening the veil between the dream world and reality) in communicating with each other to shut down the Azadi Engine. Meanwhile, Kian has climbed to where the Prophet/Westhouse is absorbing the dream energy for the culmination of his plan, and dispatches the nearby Klacks with the Silver Spear Westhouse used to kill the White Dragon in the previous game. Filled with eldritch magics, the Silver Spear destroys the soul-stone that Westhouse had placed inside Klacks for safekeeping, and with it unleashes the trapped Undreaming back into Westhouse, who is seemingly disintegrated by the vast amount of dream energy.

While this is happening, some loose ends are getting tied up outside the tower's core. Hami falls in honorable battle, his forces overwhelmed by Commander Vamon's. Once it becomes clear that the Resistance is winning and there is no way to excuse the immense magical energies radiating from the Azadi tower, Vamon pushes Sister Sahya off the balcony of her office, determined to let her take the fall (as it were) for their scheming. Vamon himself is cornered at the pier by the vengeful Resistance and Azadi, though its Anna who spills the first blood by avenging what Vamon did to her back when they and Kian were all street urchins in Sahir. Mother Utana appears to escape after gloating over Kian's collapsed form, claiming that she'll continue the work the Prophet started in eliminating the magicals back in their homeland of Azadir. Westhouse rematerializes in Stark, getting the drop on Helena and Gabriel. Zoe uses all her Dreamer power to halt Westhouse, allowing the Lux inside her and the Nox inside Westhouse to combine and neutralize each other.

After this, we get a series of mini-epilogues, followed by a semi-major one that concludes the game. Zoe wakes up in her Casablanca hospital room again, though now Gabriel is there and promises to tell her everything. Helena and Westhouse vanished after Zoe used her dream powers and collapsed, and an injured Gabriel managed to take her out of the facility and back home to Casablanca. We also find out that Reza had been brainwashed by WATI this whole time to keep tabs on Zoe, that Sully finally managed to publish the tell-all on WATI that has fully incriminated them, and that WATI, EYE and the corrupt politicians of Propast are all being investigated by whatever amounts to a global peacekeeping force on Stark. Reza then appears, looking fairly sheepish, and Zoe beams as he walks in. Kian says his goodbyes to the Resistance: Shepard is returning to what's left of her deer-people, but she's left the Resistance in the capable hands of Enu. Na'ane decides to accompany Kian back to Sahir, as Kian intends to root out the corruption still remaining in the Azadi capital. He's also being joined by Saga: Saga determines that her place is by Kian's side for as long as his struggle continues, and also suggests that Kian adopt her for the sake of convenience as a nameless woman won't get far in Azadi soceity. Thus, she becomes Lady Alvane. A confused Kian concedes, but demands more answers about who and what Saga is and how she knew when to save him while they head back to Sahir, or she's getting thrown overboard.

We then move five years into the future. Zoe has settled in her hometown of Casablanca, and is relaxing on a sofa with a book and Wonkers, looking visibly pregnant. Kian has managed to unite the entire Azadi nation under his leadership, beginning his legendary reign as the Bloodless King. Standing by his side is the magical Na'ane and the shifter Saga, as well as a very young crow sitting on Saga's shoulder...

We then move several unknown decades into the future, as an elderly Saga prepares to light the fireplace for her guest. The player can opt to look at the various keepsakes littering the living room of the house between worlds - many reflect Saga's life of adventures through the multiverse, her reflections on her departed parents and the Draic Kin she knew (including Queenie, who was actually the dragon Rose), and the last two portraits tell of what happened to Kian and Zoe (spoiler: they lived long and prosperous lives). Before she can sit down, an elderly Crow taps on the window and wants in. Saga tells her that he cannot be around when she receives her guest, because it would "raise too many questions" and beckons him to sit upstairs for a while. Finally settling down, she welcomes her guest to her hearth: a bewildered April Ryan from The Longest Journey, who meets Lady Alvane mid-way through that game, thus tying up the last loose end. Roll credits.

The Bit at the End

Naturally, that was a hell of a lot of plot exposition, but that's what this final Book needed to be in the end. It wouldn't do to leave the viewers with too many questions regarding their favorite characters and outstanding plot details without sitting them down in a motorized rollercoaster car, lowering the safety bar and letting them see it all unfold from a place of limited interaction. While I'm generally of the sort who might place engaging game mechanics above story, even in adventure games, that perspective is usually based on the unfortunate fact that video game narratives aren't generally all that great. I can enjoy a standard video game tale if it's on the periphery of whatever interaction is involved, but I can't really name a single video game story I'd be inclined to sit down and read if it happened to be a book. The Longest Journey, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and Dreamfall Chapters might be the exception to that, so I'm actually fairly pleased with where Book 5's priorities were at with this final leg of Zoe Castillo's, Kian Alvane's and April Ryan's journey.

The big questions one always asks with any episodic adventure game that puts story and narrative above all else: Was it worth the months-long waits between the release of each episode? Was the final product cohesive enough despite being split into several mostly self-contained episodes? Sometimes these games start strong and end comparatively weakly (e.g. Life is Strange) or hit rough patches somewhere in the middle (what I hear is the case with The Wolf Among Us, something I intend to confirm firsthand eventually), but I can say that Dreamfall Chapters is a case of where the game starts slow and builds up to the sort of finale that anyone could conceivably want. It took a while to get there, not to mention a few confusing puzzles that involved marching from one corner of Marcuria (or Propast) to the other, but got there it did.

I'd be far more inclined to recommend Dreamfall Chapters as it is now, fully complete, than I would've been a month ago when I had only played through the first three Books. I will say to the people skimming through this, though, that you owe it to yourselves to play through The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey beforehand. Dreamfall Chapters is, first and foremost, a fan-crowdsourced project to conclude a story that has been going on for decades, and its core directive was to reward those fans for their generosity and their patience. Coming into Dreamfall Chapters entirely fresh isn't recommended, as you'll miss a lot of the finer details of the complex-enough plot and what little you will be able to follow probably won't be enough to keep you invested in playing the later Books, especially after a few of those oblique early puzzles. All I can say is that, for all the mysteries these games have raised over the years, this final Book does its very best in answering them all, providing a cathartic and eventful conclusion to a great story along the way.