Dreamfall Chapters

Dreamfall Chapters was originally developed on the Unity 4 game engine, but was retroactively upgraded to Unity 5 before the release of Book Four. It features large 3D environments, as opposed to 2D backgrounds in The Longest Journey and smaller 3D locations in Dreamfall. While not a completely open world, the game contains several free-roaming exploration levels, such as Europolis and Marcuria, and rewards the player for exploring the levels and finding secrets. The locations themselves change slightly as the story progresses to reflect the passage of time.

The player steers playable characters from an over-the-shoulder third-person view, using either the WASD keys and mouselook or a gamepad. Interactive characters and objects are highlighted on the screen, allowing the player to interact with them using the mouse and context menus. While the game supports game controllers, it was optimized for the PC. The gameplay focus is on the exploration of the environments and the story and on solving puzzles.

In the mythology of the series, Earth is one of countless worlds in the multiverse, created from the primordial Storytime by the dreaming of a being known as Lux, the First Dreamer. Earth, or "Stark" as it is known in-game, is a world of science existing in Balance with its "Twin World" of magic, Arcadia, split off and separated from it by the impassable Divide twelve millennia ago. The game takes place in 2220 CE by Stark's reckoning, and its chief antagonist is Brian Westhouse, a Starkian trapped in Arcadia, who plans to return home by forcibly reuniting the Twin Worlds with the power of the Undreaming, the destructive counterpart to Lux. To strengthen the Undreaming with dream energy, Westhouse, as "the Prophet", had conspired with the corrupt officials of the Azadi Empire in Arcadia and an ambitious Starkian scientist Helena Chang to build a giant dream-storing Engine in the recently conquered Arcadian city-state of Marcuria and to imbue it with the dream energy stolen from Stark by Chang's lucid dream-inducing invention, the "Dreamachines".

e. humans with powers equal to Lux. She had deemed her first artificial Dreamer a failure, however, and the girl was instead raised by Chang's partner Gabriel Castillo as his own daughter, Zoë.

Funcom, the developer of the original The Longest Journey and Dreamfall, first announced Dreamfall Chapters on 1 March 2007. However, while its plot was already written out at that point, production of the game did not begin until 2012 because all of the original creators of Dreamfall, including Tørnquist, were at the time working on Funcom's next MMORPG The Secret World.

On 1 November 2012, it was announced that Tørnquist's newly-founded studio Red Thread Games began the pre-production for Dreamfall Chapters. Because Funcom's focus has shifted to online games, the company decided to license the rights to The Longest Journey IP to Tørnquist's development studio, who would fund and produce the game independently. Although Tørnquist stated he took no other Funcom employees to Red Thread Games with him, his studio hired many of the original developers of Dreamfall who have since left Funcom, as well as formed a partnership with Blink Studios, which consists of former Funcom employees who worked on Dreamfall and have since developed an expertise with the Unity engine.

Dreamfall Chapters received "mixed or average" reviews from critics for the PC and PlayStation 4 versions, while the Xbox One version received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. Ragnar Tørnquist reported in April 2019 that Dreamfall Chapters had performed "very well" commercially, with sales above 500,000 units. He noted that "at least 50 per cent of the audience are women", a percentage similar to that of The Longest Journey.

Upon reviewing all five Books on PC for the Adventure Gamers website, Emily Morganti concluded that "Chapters is worth playing to see how [The Longest Journey] saga ends but doesn't hold up as a standalone adventure". While praising the game for its visuals and likeable characters, she had described the plot as "convoluted" and the gameplay, as "often dull or frustrating", and commented that the plot branching "doesn't live up to its potential".