The Dream Machine: Chapter 1 & 2 Reviews

I tried to like this game but the puzzles are very bad and illogical or simply dumb. Pros: atmospheric. Good art. cons: very dumb puzzle.

Bought this due to the interesting graphical style and what was hinted of the story in previews. Other than what I have heard about the ending I am sure there is "fun" to be had in this adventure game but I did not like the game experience where you have to take so many extra steps and clicks to do almost anything. Most flavor text and conversations I read thus far is very boring and it is often not clear what I should even be doing to progress the game apart from the super obvious ones. Lots of empty useless rooms which I had to go back and forth from in an attempt to figure out what I was going to do in response to [spoiler]the mover obstructing the entrance with your sofa.[/spoiler] Speaking of rooms I did not find a way to speed up going to other areas by double clicking or the likes and had to let him finish walking somewhat slowly to it every single time. My biggest issue is it is often unnecessarily convoluted and your interactions, such as piecing together a torn note, is just unintuitive in its execution. Many very old point and click adventure games I have played had better and less frustrating game design and mechanics than this. It wasn't impossible, and I did progress at times, but playing it just wasn't enjoyable for me on a game mechanic design level and the lack of visual or written feedback or hints as well as narrative. The puzzles were mostly both frustrating and boring at the same time. And as many have said it crashes quite a lot. I am sure in my case I would enjoy the story better seeing someone other than me playing it but I recommend people try the first 2 chapters before purchasing the entire game if possible.

as a point and click game, it is definitely immersive, although the length of the chapters are not equal. the experience devolves into frustration when you are forced to make leaps in logic because it is a dreamscape where anything can happen. and it frequently crashes. Last chapter is a monologue, and the long cut scenes are boring. played it, but i wouldnt recommend it unless you like artistic interpretations of childhood trauma.

Lags. FPS drops. Full on crashes due to memoery errors. When errors and crashes occur, the game makes reference to problems with Adobe Flash - possibly the source of all the issues? Anyway.... The art and vibe of this game are wonderful. The story is interesting and fairly well written. The puzzles are often a touch obtuse and there's no help; precious few reminders in the form of conversations or notes or anything to guide you down the right path. This is fine most of the time, but for the really obscure puzzles, it's just a waste of time. Chapter 5 in particular has such an absurd number of screens that when you don't know where you're going or what you're doing, you waste HOURS traversing - and there's no double-click-to-exit-screen functionality. The text also features a short delay when appearing on screen - this means you can't rapidly exit dialogue you've already seen if you retrigger it, and will spend ages having to sloooooooowly click through it all again. I wanted to love this game but there's too many obstacles. Artistically it's an absolute triumph, but the extreme slowdown that comes jointly from the games technical issues and the bad implementation of point-n-click philosophy means I can't recommend it.