A Dream Of Silence: Act 3

As a straight white dude, for good or ill I very rarely find myself second-guessing my opinions too intensively. I mean, I like to think that I’m pretty ecumenical in my viewpoints, and when it comes to reviewing it’s frequently the case that I’ll like something but understand why other folks might not, or find something doesn’t have much personal appeal while getting the reasons why it might be generally popular. But every once in a while I hit a game like A Dream of Silence. I really like everything else by Abigail Corfman I’ve ever played; D&D adventures are one of my guilty pleasures; heck, while I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 the earlier games in the series are among my all-time favorites. So when I bounced off the first part of this game (which was entered in this year’s Spring Thing) so hard my ears are still ringing, I couldn’t help feeling like there was something off in my judgment – maybe the first third is just slow and I’ll like the other parts better? Maybe if I was more familiar with BG3 in general, or Astarion, the elven vampire who’s the primary character here, in specific, the emotional beats would resonate more? Maybe if I had more experience with and native affinity for fanfiction I’d better vibe with an unabashed fan-game? Maybe I’m just working out sublimated resentment towards the DnD branding people for slapping “Baldur’s Gate 3” on a game whose connections to the first two seem superficial at best?

So I was looking forward to trying to play this culminating part of the game as an opportunity to start with a blank slate, reset my expectations, and try and find the positive elements in the scenario that other reviewers could detect in the first part. But while I definitely enjoyed my time with part three far more than I did with the prologue, my overall take stands: neither the narrative and mechanical elements of Dream of Silence really work for me, and I remain bummed out about that fact.

The setup for the series is that a random encounter with a nightmare-inducing beastie that feeds on fear has thrown Astarion into a catatonic state where he psychically relives his time in thrall to his vampiric sire; you’re able to exploit a telepathic connection to try to help him escape by joining him in the dream, albeit only showing up as a spirit whose ability to sense, much less impact, the environment is profoundly limited. Act 1 turned on understanding your predicaments and balancing your exploration of the cell where Astarion was trapped with building your nascent Sight, Speech, and Touch skills and maintaining his physical and mental well-being. As Act 3 begins, Astarion has finally managed to get out of the cell after what he’s experienced as several months of solitary confinement, and it’s up to you to help guide him past his vampire siblings in search of a way out.

I’ll come back to the narrative side of things in a bit, but first I need to go into more detail on how the gameplay works. This is an RPG-inflected game, and you need to prioritize the three aforementioned skills – you’ll be pretty good at one, middling at a second, and miserable at a third. As a spirit, your actions are also constrained by a ten-point energy gauge; anything you do of any significance will eat up at least one chunk of energy, and even on the easy “Explorer” difficulty setting, you get pretty much just one recharge per encounter with the quartet of characters who stand between Astarion and freedom. Each scene progresses with dialogue, and potential physical conflict, between your companion and his brothers and sisters; meanwhile, you’re also given the opportunity to explore the environment, rifle through the furniture, check out the paintings, etc. Depending on your decisions, various gauges will fill: Astarion’s trust in you has been a key stat since Act 1, while getting clues and moving past obstacles will increase your progress towards escape, and taking too much time or drawing attention ticks up a gauge tracking his sire’s focus on him.

Spelled out like that, it’s a reasonable set of systems, but in practice I found them pretty enervating. You don’t have nearly enough energy to take even a quarter of the potential actions offered in each scene, so the opportunity cost of deciding to do anything is quite high. What’s worse, this is not a game that embraces a fail-forward ethos; you definitely can waste energy trying stuff that’s completely pointless and uninteresting, and while Explorer difficulty is tuned easy enough that that won’t prevent you from getting to the ending, it’s still pretty dispiriting and wound up discouraging experimentation. It’s also the case that there are significant elements of the game that are walled off from certain characters: I prioritized touch last, which felt like a reasonable choice (given that this is a game about interacting with Astarion, knowing what’s going on and being able to talk to him felt more important), but that meant that I was basically unable to participate in what appears to be a reasonably robust combat system. That’d be all well and good, except a large portion of the exploration rewards are focused on said system; I was especially annoyed when, prior to the final confrontation, I treaded almost all my energy to explore what was clearly flagged as a high-risk, high-reward situation, only to find a weapon that neither I nor Astarion could do anything with.

The other way I found the mechanics undermined the experience is that your explorations are bifurcated from the interactions Astarion is having with the other vampires; their charged pas-de-deux play out in a “watch” tab, while you mess about with the scenery in the “explore” tab. Time generally only passes in the former, thankfully, but at the same time the act of swapping back and forth makes the conversations, and in fact the broader plot, feel disjointed; the fact that I was continually thinking to myself “is this an important enough moment to try to use some of my precious energy?” made this intrusion of the mechanics into the narrative all the more awkward. And the story isn’t sufficiently compelling to power past these points of friction: Astarion clearly has history with the other characters, who’ve all taken different tacks for coping with a sire who’s clearly signposted as an abuser, but in their limited screen-time the best-drawn only manage to inhabit a stereotype, while the others are just forgettable.

Meanwhile, because you and Astarion are so focused on escape, the trust mechanic – and the relationship that it’s meant to model – feels besides the point; the only time I noticed it was when I was told his trust in me wasn’t quite high enough to trigger a bit of bonus dialogue when we were almost free, which hardly felt like an impactful toggle. Sure, you wouldn’t usually expect deep relationship-building in the middle of a long action scene. But remember, this is basically a dream sequence, with all the challenges that entails: none of the dangers, or other characters, really matter at all, it’s only the relationship between the protagonist and Astarion that has any lasting significance, so relegating it to second fiddle is a substantial miss.

The one big grain of salt in all of this is that I did skip past Act 2 – when starting this third piece, you’re given the choice either to replay the series from the beginning, or play a condensed version of the first two parts. I opted for the latter, since as mentioned I wanted a clear break from my earlier impressions and replaying a first act that I’d already found quite slowly-paced seemed like a bad way of accomplishing that. It’s quite possible that in the grand tradition of fantasy trilogies, the middle section is the best part – and I’m not just saying that, I can easily see that the segment of the story before the action has kicked off, but after the setup has been introduced, could be the place where deep character work is happening. But it was Act 3 that was entered into the Comp for evaluation, not 2 and 3 together, and at this point I feel like I’d be doing everyone, myself included, a favor by not playing it and letting myself imagine that that’s where all the great stuff I typically associate with the author’s games resides – it’s either that keep fretting that I’ve somehow completely missed the point again.

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.