I think this game and its sequel tried to break my PC...

[Jack Lucas Caffrey]

Today. I bought at a used game store the Limited Edition version of "Dreamfall: The Longest Journey" which came with "The Longest Journey", a soundtrack CD and (obviously) "Dreamfall". I tried installing both games on my Windows 11 PC using my external DVD drive. After installing both of them, I tested both to see if they could boot, and that's where things started to go wrong.

I was able to boot into "The Longest Journey" no problem. However I couldn't exit the game without using the Task Manager, and then I noticed some fonts on my computer were pixelated all of a sudden! It was like the game installed older versions of fonts I already had, but I'm not entirely sure. Then I booted into "Dreamfall" and it asked me to install some extra files to get the game running, I clicked "yes" on that. Then it asked me to reboot my computer, so I did.

When it restarted, my PC showed a blue screen with "BitLocker" written on it, initially trying to get past it would come up a screen saying my PC couldn't get repaired, and that's when I knew something went HORRIBLY wrong. Never in all my years buying old PC games have I had this happen, at best they run perfectly and at worst they don't boot. These two games however set a new low for me!

Thankfully, after about an hour trying to figure out how to fix the problem, I was able to get Windows booting again. I just had to restore it to an earlier update, so I lost nothing and it's running fine now.

However, after having that happen. I'm extremely hesitant to use the installation discs again. My guess is that the games are too old to run on Windows 11, and using the installation discs to get them to run just breaks Windows instead. I'm not 100% sure though, so I'd like to ask...

1: Has either "The Longest Journey" or "Dreamfall" done this to any of your computers?

2: Would it be better to buy the games on Steam or GOG instead?

If I should relay this post to the "Dreamfall" community page too, please let me know as I normally don't use forums at all, but this is an exception because I can't find anyone mentioning the same thing as me online.

Thanks in advance!

[Silent Proti]

Tbh I didn't and would not bother to run my og disks (though what a sweet deal, even a soundtrack!). Maybe you can try using ScummVM - the website for TLJ HD mod instructs to run the game via it and it works for me, so it may as well if you want to use the CD installation, at least for TLJ.
It's quite surprising you got BitLocker, but messed up fonts or screen resolution after running a game does not surprise me. After all, TLJ was supposed to run on Win98. If you decide to try Dreamfall, still I'm interested if it works!