No one has rated this review as helpful yet
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 3.2 hrs on record
Posted: Apr 27, 2016 @ 4:16pm
Updated: Apr 27, 2016 @ 9:50pm

There is an easy way you can play this game without paying for it; on a windy day at night time take 10 photos from your family's photo album and throw them out the window. While you search for them in the empty streets think about your childhood, your parents, your dreams, the choices you made that led you to where you are now, and ask where is it all going. If you are a young adult still searching for your place in this world, then you probably already had these thoughts and questions, so you already "played the game". Don't expect to find any answers to those questions here.

STORYTELLING, DESIGN AND GAMEPLAY

Even though the idea of exploring these girl's troubling thoughts via her dreams is rather interesting the execution fails in many ways. The story and the girl have no depth. There are no long monologues that would lead you a bit deeper into her past or her mind, all you get is obvious symbolism, and one or two sentences describing the location or the photos she found. You wont get to know this girl, her family or friends, and she seems to be the most average person you can imagine with the most common problems we all have.

The maps are made using an old technique where the environment is a slideshow of static photos, and you click on the part of photo to move to that area. There are also some 3D animations at the end of the dreams. The game is released in 2011 and the resolution of the photos is 640x480. There is simply no excuse for such low quality images in 2011. Other than that the locations of the dreams are visually not very interesting, plus they are very small. In the first dream/location you can only look around, you don't even move, and other dreams are just a 50 meter long walk in one direction. You can click through the whole game in 10 minutes.

You have 4 dreams/locations and each one has 1 main and 3 alternative endings. You can also collect 9 photos in each dream. The various endings are just some random symbolic 3D animations followed by the girl's short comment. Then you are sent to the main menu, and you need to restart the dream to see what the other endings/animations are about. Constant switching from game to menu just breaks the immersion.

You trigger the ending by drawing a certain shape on a certain location... and that is it. It is all made so easy that in the first dream the solution is drawn on your first screen 6 times !!! Solutions for other endings can be found either in the photos or glowing somewhere in the environment, you can't miss it. Other photos either explain the controls to move around or they are some random photo from the girls past. There are only around 10 personal photos in the whole game, but each dream contains the same photos explaining the same controls. That is simply ridiculous, instead of using the photos to tell me more about the girl, they repeat the same control instructions 4 times. It's such a waste.

CONCLUSION

The photos can be tricky to find, and after I finished the game for the first time, I was expecting that finding all the photos and getting all the various endings for each dream will give me a new "good" final ending that will give some closure to all this, but it didn't. The new ending video had few different shots, but there was no change overall. The whole game feels like a blend of various missed opportunities that could have led to a very interesting experience.
Was this review helpful? Yes No Funny Award