If you were looking for an excuse to replay The Longest Journey, one of the best adventure games of all time (opens in new tab), then look no further than The Longest Journey HD, a new mod with upscaled backgrounds and sprites, a redrawn user interface and other smaller visual improvements.
Modder Faberman used a neural network to upscale the assets, and has done the same with in-game cutscenes, which you can download separately here (opens in new tab). Judging by the screenshots of the mod (opens in new tab) it's definitely an improvement on the original, and environmental details are much easier to see.
To run the mod you'll have to own the base game and also install game engine ResidualVM, because the original engine doesn't support modified assets. The full instructions are here (opens in new tab).
Faberman says they will continue to make minor changes to the mod: there's still "room for improvement", partly because the quality of the original assets aren't consistent. Since the 1.0 release they've put out a hotfix for one specific location in the game, for example.
If you've never played The Longest Journey, which came out in 2000, then it's absolutely worth grabbing it on Steam (opens in new tab) or GOG (opens in new tab) during a sale so you can explore its two fascinating worlds, one fantasy, one a futuristic version of our own.
