External Links

Play Online
Play online and vote
During the 2024 IF Competition.
A​_Dream​_of​_Silence​_Act​_3.zip
Contains Act 3​/index.html
Play this game in your Web browser. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

A Dream Of Silence: Act 3

by Abigail Corfman profile

Episode 3 of A Dream of Silence
2024
Fantasy Fan Fiction
Twine

(based on 4 ratings)
1 review7 members have played this game.

About the Story

There's a monster made of dreams. It has its teeth in your companions. It builds nightmares out of their worst memories and drinks their pain.

One of your companions has a very bad worst memory. Solitary confinement. Locked in a tomb for a year. Vampires can't starve to death. A biological advantage with horrible consequences.

You just spent a month in his nightmare. Telling stories in the dark and keeping him from dying of despair. This game starts on the day you break out.

Content warning: Torture, Slavery, Violence, Abuse, Toxic Relationships, Unhealthy Coping Strategies, Implied Alcoholism, Victim Blaming, Hunting Animals

Awards

Ratings and Reviews

5 star:
(2)
4 star:
(2)
3 star:
(0)
2 star:
(0)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating: based on 4 ratings
Number of Reviews Written by IFDB Members: 1
Write a review
BG3 Astarion tamagotchi light roleplaying game , September 22, 2024
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 2 hours

I'm going to review all 3 acts here.

This a Baldur's Gate game. It is possible to play and generally understand it without having played the game (I'm in that scenario) but it generally builds off the associations, motivations, and understood characteristics of that game, which I've only partially absorbed through meme osmosis.

The story is that Astarion (here's where the pre-existing knowledge deficit kicks in) and you have been sucked into a nightmare world by a creature that feeds off of suffering. Astarion who, in the 'real world', has made great progress in escaping from an abusive vampire overlord, has now regressed and in his mind is back where he was at the start, hopeless and alone.

Gameplay in all three acts revolves around a combination of exploration and conversation. All significant actions cost energy, which you only have ten units of at a time. In the first two acts, energy is replenished every night, and you also level 3 skills of manifesting as a dream ghost: Speech, Sight, and Touch. In the third act, energy is replenished by finding secret 'gleams', and you can no longer level your attributes.

In all three days, Astarion has a health bar which, if it goes low enough, will cause him to die. Each day has other important meters as well, such as Astarion's mood, or the attention that can be drawn to you. Basically, this game is an Astarion Tamagachi.

For the first two days, the main goal it to keep him from dying. I discovered after some experimentation that the amount of health he loses or gains each day is based on his mood. I kept dying over and over early on from trying to max my stats first, but in fact there is plenty of time to boost stats with leftover actions. The main goal here is to please this man.

The main difference between the first and second days is that the second day adds more 'special' events with objects and intruders, while the first day just sets up the rhythm of the game as a whole.

The third day is very different, as you are pulled from encounter to encounter, where Astarion talks to people while you explore or interact.

This game is brutally hard (for me!). I died many times trying to complete Act I. There's just almost never enough actions to go around. I found it useful to save every day and reload if I don't achieve my goals. I made over 50 save files through all three acts.

The third act seemed impossibly hard and frustrating until another reviewer pointed out that you can get new actions by finding 'gleams'. I'd spoiler that but I think it's a fundamental part of gameplay and shouldn't be difficult to find in the first place. Finding that, and realizing the 'conversations' often stalled, giving you enough time to explore, helped this section work out better.

Visually and auditorially, the game is beautiful, with nice styling, transitions, fonts, colors, and sound choice.

Conceptually, while this game is symbiotic or even parasitic object, only able to exist in tandem with the resources provided by Baldur's gate, it still (to me) had a generally satisfying plot arc and some nice power progression.

Many ifcomp games are made for ifcomp. This seems like a passion project that just happened to be good enough to enter into Spring Thing and IFComp. I like it.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Search all tags on IFDB | View all tags on IFDB

Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Game Details

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page


This is version 8 of this page, edited by Dan Fabulich on 29 September 2024 at 12:12am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page