Don't Wake Me Up

The story starts out with you trapped in a videogame universe, trying to figure out what just happened. For the first part, you travel through several videogame worlds, meeting some other characters seemingly in the same predicament while being treated to various videogame references and jokes. It's an interesting start, although there is one very annoying spaceship puzzle which gave me a lot of frustration on my first run (it took me three attempts to beat it, on a blind playthrough) and alone really deterred me from multiple playthroughs.

There are two romance interests in the game. Be warned, there is no happily ever after here. Trying to keep things spoiler free, the game splits into two separate paths depending on your selection, with one RO path having much more content than the other. Here, the game explores some really thought provoking themes of AI, reality, existence and so on. I felt it was really well done, although folks after a happy ending would likely disagree.

There is plenty of branching at the second half of the game, and the writer released a full flowchart. However, if you want to see most of it, this necessitates playing through the earlier chapters all over again and doing that annoying spaceship puzzle all over again. Having checkpoints or a save system (seriously) would have made exploring more endings a less daunting proposition. For me, I played the game twice (one with each RO) and was too lazy to go back for more.

It's definitely a unique game in terms of genre and structure, and one that really gets you thinking. I liked it a lot, but it's definitely not for everyone.

And please give me the option to skip that spaceship puzzle on second playthroughs! (I know the game gives you an option to skip it, but I only got it after failing the puzzle twice.)