"I think this is the next generation of adventure games," claimed a slightly haggard Ragnar Tornquist after showing off his upcoming title Dreamfall to Adventure Gamers at the 2005 Game Developer's Conference. A week of preview appointments and late-night parties did nothing to diminish the noted designer's enthusiasm for his labor of love. Animated as usual, Tornquist played through two sections of the sequel to the acclaimed 1999 adventure The Longest Journey.

The theme stressed most in this particular demonstration was a closer and more natural link between the gameplay and the events of the plot than we tend to see in adventure games, which often have puzzles and cutscenes that seem bolted on to the underlying story. Tornquist voluntarily admitted that The Longest Journey had its share of these pitfalls, but everything we've seen indicates that he's well on his way to crafting a game which puts each aspect of the gameplay—from puzzles to conversation system to the hotly-debated combat—in the service of story and character development. The game has monopolized our Hype-O-Meter for as long as I can remember, and I see no reason for that to change any time soon.

The first scene we were shown is from the game's opening, when the player is introduced to Zoë, the only one of the game's three playable characters in this demo. We find her lying in bed unconscious, as sunlight streams through her blinds onto the sheets, with her distraught and silent father sitting at her side. The scene is almost startling in its beauty, and the lush music (a collaboration between composer Leon Willett and Funcom music director Morten Sorlie) is expressive and fitting; slightly reminiscent of Barrington Pheloung's score for the first two Broken Sword games. Zoë is, for reasons not yet revealed, in a coma. Her mother has already passed away many years ago. In a captioned voiceover, Zoë makes a vague and urgent appeal to the player: something terrible is happening (or has happened) and anybody who can help or even knows that anything is going wrong is dead. This being a videogame, the player is the only one with the power to put things right.

I said that Zoë's message was delivered through a voiceover, but it's worth noting that at this point in time there has been no finalized voice recording. Funcom is doing extensive auditioning and searching to find the best possible actors for the game, and Ragnar noted that the cast will be much more diverse, with a broader range of accents and nationalities than in the previous game.

Rewind a few weeks to a less traumatic time. Much like April at the beginning of The Longest Journey, Zoë is a college-aged girl without much sense of what to do with her life. She was a student at Capetown University studying biotechnology, her father's field, but eventually broke up with her boyfriend and dropped out of school after feeling unfulfilled. Since then she has returned home and is living with her old man in an attractive part of Casablanca (circa 2219), a city made wealthy by the biotechnology industry—gamers familiar with The Longest Journey will remember that Africa has grown to the status of a major world power on the strength of its biotech advances. Also like April, Zoë fills most of her days hanging out with friends and spending time at a local coffee shop.

As the player takes control, Zoë is in the midst of watching a TV news broadcast that is suddenly and inexplicably interrupted by a screen filled with static, over which is juxtaposed disturbing footage of a young girl cryptically imploring the viewer to help. Zoë dismisses the event as a viral marketing scheme and turns off the television. Soon after, her cell phone rings and she heads downstairs, where she encounters her father. He is slightly concerned with her lack of direction, but supportive of her decisions in general. It is a rather blatant but appropriate segment devoted to characterization, and Ragnar stressed the importance of building the player's emotional investment into the game's world and characters.

When Zoë steps outside, the game's usage of full real-time 3D is justified in spades. The town of Casablanca is lovingly detailed and seems designed with a goal of architectural coherence in mind; something lacking from the environmental design of many videogames. Like The Longest Journey, Dreamfall has a fresh take on the future. Rather than the 'Cybertastical Shinymatic 3000 Robotland' approach all too common in the gaming world, Dreamfall's urban city of the future has a much more natural feel, with modern and past Moroccan design sensibilities organically coexisting with more obvious futuristic elements, as well as various other architectural cues. It is both evocative of, and distinct from, the previous game's city of Venice.

All this visual splendor is unsullied by the presence of any kind of interface. Unless the player is actively engaged in a conversation or in the manipulation of inventory items, there are no extraneous elements on the screen. Funcom wants an experience as immersive and cinematic as possible, and removal of a visible interface is a good place to start. We were shown the PC version being controlled by an Xbox gamepad, and so there was not even so much as a cursor on the screen. Ragnar still did not describe how the native PC control scheme would work, but he did say that it is "mouse-only" and will feel completely natural for the game.