It rains in Propast the way it rains in a city that has given up on you. Neon on wet concrete, a rail bridge overhead, a noodle stand doing steady trade at two in the morning, and behind it a housing block where nothing is quite the right temperature. Ten years ago this month, Red Thread Games released the last book of Dreamfall Chapters and left that city standing. It is still the best argument the series ever made.
The lineage takes some explaining, which has always been the problem. The Longest Journey arrived in 1999, a point-and-click adventure about April Ryan, an art student who discovers she can cross between a technological Earth called Stark and a magical world called Arcadia. Dreamfall followed in 2006, handed the story to Zoe Castillo, swapped in third-person action nobody has ever defended, and ended on a cliffhanger so abrupt the fanbase treated it as an open wound for seven years. Dreamfall Chapters, Kickstarted in 2013 and released in five episodes between 2014 and 2016, is the answer to that cliffhanger.
A City That Does Not Want You Comfortable
Europolis, and its district of Propast, is why people still install this game. It is not cyberpunk as costume. There are no rain-slicked katanas. It is a European megacity with a housing shortage, a municipal election, a functioning underclass, several languages fighting over the same street sign, and a soup kitchen that is also a political operation. The technology is present and unexplained, which is the whole trick. Nobody stops to describe how the Wire works. They complain about the queue at the registration office.
It is the only science-fiction city I have visited where the shops are open, the paperwork is real, and nobody explains the technology to me. You just live inside the annoyance of it.
Petra Lindqvist spent four years coordinating an unofficial Swedish localisation of the series and has read more of its dialogue than any sensible person should. She points out something easy to miss: the two halves are told in different registers. Zoe’s Propast is grubby and administrative. Kian Alvane’s Marcuria, under occupation, is theatrical and formal, closer to stage drama, and the game never blends them. Cutting between the two is the structure, not a gimmick.
It is not a flawless thing to return to. Episodic release cut the pacing to pieces across two years. The choice system promises more consequence than it delivers, and a couple of the heavier decisions funnel back into the same corridor within the hour. Book Five is still argued over and that argument is not ending. Newcomers should also know the order, because no store page will tell them:
- The Longest Journey, 1999. Slow, enormous, worth it. Play it first or you will not care about anybody.
- Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, 2006. The combat is bad. Endure it for Zoe and Kian.
- Dreamfall Chapters, 2014 to 2016. Take the reworked release, which rebuilt the first book’s environments and staging.
What did not happen is the part that stings. Red Thread went on to make Draugen, a quiet Norwegian ghost story, and then Dustborn, a very loud American road trip. The third proper Longest Journey, announced a decade ago and periodically confirmed to still be somebody’s intention, has not materialised. April Ryan’s story remains unfinished in a way Zoe’s is not.
The noodle stand is still there under the bridge, the rain is still falling on it, and the game still has the confidence to make you walk past all of it slowly.
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