Dreamland

Like Tower, Dreamland feels like one of those games that's more about the experience than anything else. The scenes in Dreamland are more concrete, though. I played through three times. In all three playthroughs, I started off with a decision of what to do (read a book, have a snack, play a computer game) before going to sleep. After that choice, I was presented with three different scenes while dreaming: (Spoiler - click to show)watching a play (it's Shakespeare's As You Like It, apparently), perusing a market, and visiting a library. These scenes were presented in different orders the three times I played, though.

There are two small puzzles to solve in Dreamland:
(Spoiler - click to show)
1. Helping the shoemaker find his wife. You have a couple of different options when you find out where she is, though. For instance, you don't have to tell him the truth.
2. Giving the right book to the librarian. The right book was different for my two playthroughs. I think it was tied to whether I was dreaming to remember or dreaming to forget. I also think it was tied to my choice of activity right before going to sleep.

Neither puzzle is that difficult, although it took me several tries to (Spoiler - click to show)find the right book to give to the librarian.

The writing felt somewhat dreamlike to me, in keeping with the game's theme, although there were a few too many small spelling and grammar mistakes for my taste.

Feels like someone programmed a weird dream they once had into a short game. It was just odd and I didn't find any meaning in it. I think there was a glitch in it if you don't go in a certain order, or maybe it was caused by playing through a second time without restarting the game, but it felt like the game assumed you would go through it from A to B and only explained the first part of B in part A, so starting with B as you are allowed to do is confusing.

This game is fairly simple, but a pleasant way to pass the time.

You are given warnings about how what you do before bed affects your dreams. Then you fall asleep.

You experience 3 dream vignettes, one with a puzzle, one with little agency, and one with a few moral choices. The order you experience these vignettes in depends on your earlier actions.

This game would be good for an interactive fiction class to analyse, because it has some delayed branching, a variety in choice structures, and is small enough to digest.

However, the game itself isn't strongly polished. I had the impression of grammar mistakes at times, and the visual presentation could be developed more.

First it was a bit hard to me to find out what is the task in this game. It's a rather short, and maybe a bit surreal interactive experience. The game not as hard as it seems. It counts in the game that what you did before you go to bed. There is 1 really task in the game: to choose the correct book in the library. The correct book always depends on our choices before sleeing. Brilliant! The writer's last year's entry was better, but it's also done. One of the best games in this Year. I give it a 5.