The year is 2219, and the world of Stark is recovering from the Collapse ten years prior. You are first introduced to one of three playable characters, Zo¿ Castillo, a former bioengineering student turned university dropout, currently lacking in ambition and goals and trying to discover what she wants to do with her life. The daughter of a prominent biotechnologist, she lives in Casablanca and spends her days going to the gym, learning a thing or two about hand-to-hand combat, throwing parties, and drinking a bit too much wine. Her life turns upside down, though, when she is contacted by her ex-boyfriend, a journalist working on a top-secret story who asks her to get involved. This comes just as she begins seeing strange visions on television of a floating house and a mysterious, scary little girl who bids her to "find her… save April."
The team behind Dreamfall has put a lot of work into adding details to the environments to bring you living, breathing worlds to explore. Wandering the streets of Casablanca, I encountered playing children, wandering businessmen off for a cup of coffee, and sleazy guys hanging at a sushi bar, trying to pick up on the local ladies. In the future world of Stark, much like present-day Earth, advertising is rampant, and glancing up at the big screen above the market square I learned that Alchera was coming, and "all my wildest dreams would come true."
The graphics are detailed and clean on the Xbox version of Dreamfall that I've been playing. There are rich, colorful environments and attractive, well-animated character models with swishing ponytails and realistic movements. The game scores higher from an artistic standpoint than on a technical basis, with some very nice backdrops that make the best use of basic weather effects, giving you the impression of real beauty without as much detail as we've seen in some of the current next-generation software. Skylines, for instance, never really draw much attention, but I found myself standing on a balcony in Casablanca and looking out over the city, thinking to myself how believable it all was.
I can't get enough of discovering the many things that can be inspected and manipulated, and the game's interaction tool, the focus field, made checking out everything in sight a breeze. The way the focus field works is a context-sensitive outline appears around any item or object that your character is facing. Once a person is outlined in the focus field, for instance, you can hand them items you've found, listen in on their conversations, give them a cursory inspection or try and start up a dialogue of your own.
