Chapters takes place in 2219 and continues the story of Dreamfall, whose protagonist Zoë Castillo had uncovered a criminal conspiracy that aimed to enslave both Stark and Arcadia by stealing their residents' dreams.

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".

Chang had also secretly planned to instead use the stolen dream energy to reshape reality itself with the help of her genetically engineered "Dreamers", i.e. humans with powers equal to Lux.

[15] After putting Zoë in a coma, Chang brought her body to a secret lab in Mumbai,[15] while her consciousness became trapped in Storytime along with millions of Dreamachine addicts'.

[16] On one of Kian's missions for the rebels, he bonds with a young Dolmari urchin named Bip, who helps him uncover an imminent raid on the magical ghetto.

Kian mounts a rescue mission and witnesses his country's atrocities against the magical peoples,[14] using this evidence to convince Hami to bring down the Marcurian officials before they activate the Engine.

Crow, back from his journey with Zoë, shows Kian a secret passage to the Engine control room, but before he can sabotage it, Mother Utana reveals herself as another agent of the Prophet and fatally wounds him.

Zoë, in the meantime, finds herself in Storytime again, where Crow's ghost helps her to piece together the Prophet's plan and leaves for the afterlife together with April's spirit.

[15] A week later, Kian leaves Marcuria to pursue Utana, but is intercepted by Saga who, acting on another prophecy, demands to join him and also that he adopts her, foreshadowing the major role they both will play in the War of the Balance that is to precede the looming reunification of the Twin Worlds.

Five years later, Kian and Saga look over the Azadi capital, ready to face their destiny, while Zoë enjoys a peaceful life in Casablanca, pregnant with a baby.

In the game, the realm of "Storytime" is "the place where every story begins, and where dreams come to life",[8] and the developers cite the Australian Aboriginal mythology as inspiration.

[23] The megacity of Europolis is presented as "Europe [...] finally paying the price for hundreds of years of imperialism, reactionary politics, wasteful spending and industrialisation".

[24] However, while its plot was already written out at that point,[25] the production of the game couldn't 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.

Although game's intended full title has always been Dreamfall Chapters, the developers had used the subtitle The Longest Journey during the Kickstarter campaign to improve brand recognition.

The goals achieved included Linux and Mac support, an expanded storyline, several new locations, an improved soundtrack, an interactive comic book, French- and German-language versions, and director's commentary.

[36] The ultimate stretch goal, unlocked at $2 million, was The Longest Journey Home, a traditional 2D point-and-click adventure game starring April Ryan, that would bridge the ten-year time gap between TLJ and Dreamfall and extend to after Chapters to conclude her storyline.

"[39] The first playable prototype of Dreamfall Chapters had been produced concurrently with the ongoing Kickstarter campaign and was used to record in-game footage to attract additional funding.

Adoption of a cost-saving third-party engine, Unity 4, has enabled the developers to iterate much faster on Chapters than on the original Dreamfall, which took six months to produce a prototype.

[10] Among the biggest challenges faced by the developers were the GUI and control scheme (a pure point-and-click interface was implemented early on but scrapped after the testers found it impractical[9]) and the pathfinding AI for the NPCs.

[13] By late September 2013, RTG completed the vertical slice of the game, implementing all of its core features in a 20–30 minute-long demo,[41] which was shown to the public at Journeycon, a fan convention taking place in Oslo on 23 November 2013.

[48] On 26 August 2014, RTG announced a musical competition among Kickstarter backers and other fans, who were asked to submit soundtrack pieces to be included in the finished game.

[53] Voice recording for the third episode took place simultaneously in Los Angeles, New York City and London and was completed on 20 May 2015, shortly before the Book's subtitle had been announced.

[54] For various reasons, several developers, including the design director Martin Bruusgaard (who was on a parental leave), couldn't participate in the creation of Book Three,[53] with only eight RTG employees working on the game full-time, assisted by several part-timers and freelancers.

The entire porting process took four months and cost the company between $100,000 and $150,000, due to a combination of factors, such as having to adopt new tools, to reapply all lighting effects to work with Unity's new "Enlighten" system, and to rewrite all shaders and scripts from scratch for the new engine version.

Sarah Hamilton, the voice of April Ryan in the previous games, was announced to return in Chapters during the Kickstarter campaign,[60] but is not credited in the final release.

Returning actors included Roger Raines and Ralph Byers, with the former reprising his role as Crow, and the latter as both Brian Westhouse and Roper Klacks.

The last playable character of Chapters, Saga, was voiced by Ava Khan, Eleanor Matsuura, and Susan Brown as a teenager, an adult, and an old woman (Lady Alvane), respectively.

[23] However, faced with mounting production costs, RTG decided in June 2014 to return to the episodic format,[47] and the first "book", subtitled Reborn, was released on 21 October 2014.

[72] Munich-based EuroVideo Medien had released an exclusive retail PC version of the game in Germany in 2014, containing Book One and a Steam season pass key.