Dreamteller

For the better part of two decades, I’ve enjoyed making fun of Downton Abbey for naming its sole Turkish character “Kemal Pamuk” – what is there to say about the blithe, unselfconscious Orientalism of smashing together the name of the one Turkish novelist you can think of with the one Turkish politician you can think of? But joke’s on me, maybe, because it’s not like I’ve actually read any Turkish novelists other than Orhan Pamuk, now that I think of it (I know a fair number of their politicians, at least). So I’m very much doing the Boss Baby meme when I say that Dreamteller, which per the language options appears to have been translated from Turkish, has an unreal, abstract vibe to its prose that I also associate with the Pamuk books I’ve read. Maybe both are picking up real features of how Turkish literature tends to work, much as there are distinctive stylistic tics that I’ve noticed in Russian writing translated into English, or maybe my mind is being overeager about making associations, but either way, it very much livens up this short and cryptic detective-vs.-serial-killer game.

Indeed, the bare outlines of the plot are nothing special. You’re a Holmesian high-functioning compulsive the cops call in to catch the bad guys when they’re stumped, with a knack for finding the key clue that everyone else would miss. And now that a killer who suffocates his victims before mutilating them in a very specific way has struck for a third time, the Lestrade-analogue has summoned you to the scene of the crime to do your thing. The killer, it turns out, has been waiting for this to happen, as he’s set up an elaborate game of cat and mouse targeting you, creating puzzles and enigmas that can’t help seize your obsessions and remind you of a deeply-hidden secret you’ve kept from everyone else, drawing you deeper and deeper into the tangled web he weaves, until you lose all mooring to reason and morality. So yeah, you’ve heard this story before, with the inevitable twist at the end likewise not being anything all that novel.

The choice-based interface is likewise straightforward – mostly it’s on rails, with a couple places where you can click for more background or context, and few options through the middle of the game, though his opens up as you reach the endgame where your choices guide you to one of three or four distinct endings. There’s one puzzle that largely solves itself, though I thought the bespoke interface you use to work through it was pretty nice (it should really be a bit more forgiving about capitalization and/or spacing, though – it took me two or three false starts to enter in the answer, even though I’d already figured it out).

So this would be a solid genre piece, but for the prose. Like, here’s a bit of the protagonist’s inner monologue:

How are you going to explain the void in your mind? For in your mind, swirling, intertwined mists are drifting, shifting through a thousand shades of darkness. They avoid taking a certain form, becoming a meaning. Like a dream forgotten as you try to put it into words.

I don’t know what precisely this is trying to convey – there’s a vagueness just at the tip of my tongue as I try to nail it down – but as that last sentence indicates, that’s entirely apt for the subject matter (oh, did I forget to mention that the bad guy in Dreamteller has weird powers over dreams? Yeah, of course he does) and even leaving that aside, I find it a compelling little linguistic puzzle-box to worry away at. Here’s another bit:

You also knew that searching for evidence at the crime scene would be no different than searching for the other sock of a pair. Even if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you would eventually come across a clue that would catch your attention.

That isn’t at all what it’s like for me to look for a missing sock, actually! But I can’t stop thinking about what it would feel like if it was. This hazy language maybe undercuts the game’s effectiveness as a taut psychological thriller, but that’s more than made up for by the dividends paid when considering it as a prose-poem. I may not know exactly where these vibes are coming from, but I like them.