A Dream Of Silence: Act 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 is on my to-play list, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I am also pretty sure that when I do, Astarion will not be my favorite character. Actually, it might be for the best that I played A Dream of Silence now, rather than playing Baldur’s Gate 3, becoming unreasonably attached to some other character, and developing a simmering resentment of Astarion for being the fandom’s darling. But I am aware that I’m missing important context here.

The premise of this three-part series is that a monster has trapped Astarion in a nightmare based on his past trauma. You, the PC of BG3, are able to enter his dream, but only as a sort of ghostly presence whose ability to interact with the world is limited. In Act I, you try to balance improving your abilities with keeping Astarion sane as he spends his days trapped in a dungeon with no human contact aside from you. I’m not really sure what happens in Act II, which exists as an add-on to the post-Spring Thing version of Act I and can’t be played on its own, but Act III covers the escape—first from the dungeon and then from the nightmare as a whole. It includes an abbreviated version of Acts I and II to play through if you haven’t played them before; this recap was efficient at getting the player up to speed, but had a somewhat incongruously jokey tone.

In Act III, you can no longer improve your stats; instead you’re trying to manage your energy levels and fuel Astarion’s belief in his ability to escape while avoiding attracting the attention of his master, Cazador (the one who locked him in the dungeon). The game offers a choice of either an easy “exploration mode” or a standard “balanced” difficulty, warning you that if you choose the latter, you may fail several times before figuring out how things work and what you need to prioritize. I played on “balanced” and did indeed end up having to restart twice. Even with the ability to refresh your energy once in each scene, your actions are quite limited, and basically the only way to figure out what is and isn’t worth spending them on is to try things and see what happens. But I do love a bit of resource management, so while the balancing act was tricky and required some trial and error, I found it very engaging. I also enjoyed meeting Astarion’s various vampire siblings, who I get the impression might be original to this game, or might at least be briefly-mentioned characters who have been significantly fleshed out here.

However, when I finally reached the “escaping from the nightmare” sequence, my lack of canon knowledge and existing emotional investment let me down. In this part of the game, Astarion asks you a bunch of questions about the waking world, and then you tell him stories about your adventures together. I can see what the emotional beats are supposed to be here, and I can imagine how they might work for me if I knew much about BG3, but the thing is, I don’t know the answers to his questions, so I don’t know if I’m telling him the truth or not or what the other implications might be of choosing one answer over another, and I don’t know the stories being referenced, so I have no idea what the emotional valence of each one might be. I’m not sure any of the choices in this section matter mechanically, so that’s not an issue, but the emotional weight of the scene relies on the player remembering these adventures with Astarion and making thoughtful choices about what to highlight out of a desire to inspire him by showing him how far he’s come and how much things have improved. So that fell completely flat for me.

And that’s fine, really. I’ve always felt that fanfic is its own unique art form and doesn’t need to—perhaps even shouldn’t—prioritize being enjoyable to people who don’t know the source material. But entering the game in IFComp puts it in front of a broader audience than just the fandom and invites analysis of it as a standalone work of fiction, and in that respect I didn’t think it quite worked.

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.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

I swear, this series confounds me. I played Act 1 (apparently before Act 2 was available in the download), then finished here. As previously observed, I am NOT the ideal audience. Six months on, I am no more familiar with Balder’s Gate 3, and no more disposed to High Fantasy. I really dug the gameplay in Act I, until it turned out to be NOT what I thought it was. Then I turned on it like an oily Brad Dourif character. I also begrudgingly respected what I perceived to be its thematic core. I have no idea if I’m selling the source material short here, but it FELT like it was aiming much higher than its inspiration.

Once again, I returned as a Rogue, and once again I opted to play its more difficult setting. So here’s something that was lost on me first time: my companion was ALSO A ROGUE. (Was that mentioned in part 1? I don’t remember.) He’s already an elf AND a vampire! Jeebus, leave some oxygen for other players, dude. The core mechanic of the first one, training yourself to exist(!) is still here, though as an echo of itself, now subordinate to more traditional Action point/HP mechanisms. The merging was pretty smoothly done, certainly the cockpit was well designed. The impulse to vary the formula was also well taken, I think, reflective of the evolution of the story. It’s always nice to see mechanics evolve within a game.

Thankfully, this time your companion is correspondingly more helpful and active. Actually, he kind of takes the lead in things. Your role is more to facilitate and buttress him than to drive the bus yourself, as it was last time. Again, a shift in formula is a nice way to keep things fresh. There was a gameplay choice that was kind of frustrating in the moment, but had a (probably intended) positive knockon effect. As an only semi-present being, we’ll just say ghost for convenience, you have 10 “Action Points” to spend doing things. You need to choose carefully because plenty of choices reward you with nothing. When they are gone, you need to recharge. This is structured as a series of encounters where if you recharge, you explore at the cost of MISSING THE ENTIRE SCENE. NPCs have story-relevant conversations and revelations YOU DON’T HEAR. You’re too busy rifling their bureau or whatever. Between the combination of uncertain payoffs and limited APs you are guaranteed to hear half or less of what is going on, and, unsurprisingly, unlikely to win first time through. Also, decidedly outside looking in.

But. That aggressive gameplay choice now opens you up to alter your toggle on replay, to tune into what you missed last time, and explore where you already know things! It was simultaneously confounding and irritating and encouraging of replay! It took me three times to get the full picture, and discover enough helpful items to play to closure, and that ended up being about perfect. Granted part of it was my expert gameplay, but it felt very precisely tuned to that experience, as a fourth run was probably too far down the diminishing returns ramp. Also, not for nothing, timed exactly to the judging limits of IFCOMP. Well done there.

Ok, so let’s talk the story this gameplay is in service of. If the first was an exploration of solitary confinement trauma, this was treading more traveled ground of abusive family trauma, especially amongst its victims’ stories. Again, props to the work for aiming well above (what I can only speculate is) its inspiration. This path, however, IS more heavily traveled. Well realized as this iteration was, I’m not sure it brought anything new to the discussion. The protagonist (your NPC companion, not you the player! you’re just along for the ride!) is reliving memories and relationships to (Spoiler - click to show)discover their symbolic unconscious exit. You’re just there to keep things going. In the first one, I found the companion character grating, particularly on replay and the further you got towards success. This one he was far less grating, but not really a whit more appealing. Nor were the details of the NPCs you met particularly compelling either, making all the drama between them kind of Not Your Business. It doesn’t help that, due to class overlap, he was bogarting ALL THE ROGUE WORK. I literally did nothing roguish my entire play, which, at that point, why bother making the option available? At least first time I got to pick a lock or two! Seriously, choose literally any other class to play is my advice.

So yeah, Sparks of respect in gameplay variation, the central ‘learning to exist’ conceit, thematically outstripping its inspiration (probably) and the neat trick with replayability. But by sidelining me in his journey (and not letting me ROGUE!) it was always going to be how invested I was in that story. And the answer is, not enough for engagement.

Played: 9/14/24
Playtime: 2h, 2 fails, 1 win
Artistic/Technical ratings: Sparks of Joy/Seamless
Would Play Again?: No, experience feels complete

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless