Readers of Adventure Gamers will already be familiar with the game's "focus field", the mechanism that Ragnar somewhat jokingly (but also somewhat seriously) referred to as "our revolutionary contribution to gaming". To interact with items, the player will bring up a blue radial stream of light that can be rotated around the character 360 degrees. It will act in a context-sensitive manner, so if the selected item can be interacted with, the character will interact with it; if it can only be examined, the character will examine it. As far as we know, the only other visible interface elements in the game are for conversation and inventory. When needed, your inventory will pop up from the bottom of the screen, and there you are free to examine or use items, as well as combine them with one another. When engaging in conversation, a simple and effective dialogue tree will be presented. The tree will also incorporate physical actions your character can perform. Practical uses of this system were soon presented.

In the next part of the demonstration, Zoë is performing a job for her ex-boyfriend Risa, who seems to be some kind of freelance investigative journalist. She has been instructed to pick up a package from a corporate center, but is told by the receptionist that the person she needs is not available. However, this receptionist is acting awfully strange and defensive, and to make matters even weirder, there is a waving frantic woman on a screen behind the receptionist's desk. In the ensuing conversation, Zoë is not only given the option to pursue various lines of questioning, such as asking what is on the screen, she is also given physical options including "Distract" and "Get Out". Asking what is on the screen causes the receptionist to become alarmed at the events being displayed, upon which she will leap out from behind the desk and initiate—brace yourself—a combat sequence. We were assured, however, that there are other routes that can be taken; fighting is just one option. If you do happen to lose a fight, Ragnar mentioned, you'll never have to play catch up with more than a minute or so of gameplay (during which you can presumably choose a different course of action not requiring a fight), thanks to the game's checkpoint system and save-anytime option on both PC and Xbox. In Zoë's case, it is definitely possible to never have to participate in a fight. Don't forget, Fate of Atlantis did it too.

In fact, there will be consequences for fighting. Zoë, like most of us, is someone who rarely actually trades blows; when she does, she will apparently be very upset about it and will constantly bring it up when talking to other characters. This was something I was very excited to hear. As an adventure gamer, I'm sick of every conversation existing in a vacuum; I look forward to a game in which your actions have some bearing on your character. I don't mean in the grand world-altering Knights of the Old Republic or Fable sort of way where everything you do is a moral choice of paramount importance; I mean in a more realistic day-to-day and minute-to-minute sense. Sure, the galaxy is not going to be forever altered if you punch some guy in the face, but it might have an impact on the way your character carries herself for the next few hours. Ragnar stressed that this kind of consequence system is going to be present throughout the game. It's not just an issue of whether you manage to avoid fighting; the whole game will be full of choice/consequence scenarios.

The game will also feature characters and events which do not necessarily operate on a timetable entirely based around your character. Like in The Last Express, there will sometimes be things to observe that depend on your being in a particular place at a particular time. Unlike in that game, these things will never be essential in Dreamfall, and you'll never (ever) find yourself stuck because you didn't get somewhere in time. They are purely for the purposes of added backstory and setting.

After getting past the receptionist, either through conversation, combat, or stealth, Zoë finds the woman who was on the screen locked in a transparent room as it fills with a lethal gas. An unidentified man plants an EMP charge, disabling the lock mechanism, and runs off. To save the woman, Zoë must climb up above the room and open the pressure valve, relieving the flow of gas and allowing the door to be opened. It is an intuitive puzzle (though Ragnar is reluctant to use the term "puzzles", not liking the cryptic and nonsensical connotations that have built up over the years) and fits perfectly into the context of the scene. You might be relieved to know that despite the time-sensitive nature of a room filling with gas, the scene itself is not actually timed.

All these things are whole-heartedly welcomed by me. Many or even most of the more controversial elements of Dreamfall have in fact been done before by adventure games. Funcom's innovations are in making different types of gameplay, as well as more unique elements such as the consequence system and streamlined interface, directly in the service of the story. The team is asking itself what kind of gameplay or puzzle or conversation or events are most suitable for each given story and character, and constructing the game around them, rather than the traditional method of deciding on gameplay genre and shoehorning everything into it. Ragnar often states that his game defies genre classification; it might not be a traditional adventure in the strictest sense, but it also is hardly an action/adventure. Last year he was calling it a more diplomatic "adventure/action" but these days it seems he has grown understandably weary of the constant arguments over genre names, and has elected simply to let it be whatever it is. However, he does guarantee that adventure fans will find it a worthy successor to the hallowed The Longest Journey name, and having seen it starting to take shape, I for one can't wait to see the final result.