The Sueño

This game had an interesting atmosphere, with several rather vivid and cool images (Spoiler - click to show)(the house covered in pine needles, the deserted town, the bat in the belfry). Unfortunately I couldn't finish it because I think I did something that locked me out of victory, and I didn't know until later.

One thing about this game is that it seemed to have several arbitrary elements/puzzles; you could say it's dream logic, but it just struck me as kind of unfair (how do I know I need to (Spoiler - click to show)sit on the dentist's chair and not die? how do I know i need something from the guy chasing me? how do I know I need to flush the toilet?). I ended up looking at the walkthrough a few times, which is how I discovered that I was locked out of victory. The >dream verb was very interesting, I thought, but it's only used in like 2 puzzles; it would have been interesting to use it more, and maybe it would have been of use to justify odd solutions to 'dream logic' puzzles.

Another thing that I found odd and actually frustrating with this game is the granularity of the actions: the game is pretty finicky about the things you can do and in which order. You have (Spoiler - click to show)to unwrap the box, then open it, then look into it, then take the key; you have to take off your shoes first, then your pants; you have to set each for the four dials to its individual number (instead of, say, >set dials to 9999). And similarly, there are a few times where the game refuses to do something because you didn't specify with which object you wanted to do this: unlock door "with what?", clean door "with what?". I didn't think I liked parser niceties that much, but apparently I find it frustrating to have to find the right order and/or words for something that's obvious given the puzzle.

The writing is okay, not many typos (a few), but there were quite a few instances where it kind of feels like the writer didn't put enough effort in the descriptions. There were a "non-descript door", a "non-descript shirt", a "non-descript tv", and "shoes that go with everything"; the architecture of a room is "weird but you can't really put your finger on it". At some point you have a "twilight zone" feeling, and another room feels like "brady bunch"; I think this falls in the category "show, don't tell": it'd be much better to attempt to give the player a feeling that reminds you of The Twilight Zone (your vision becomes black and white? or even has grain like an old movie?) than straight-up telling the player. It was kind of distracting because as a non-american I have no idea what those are, so they really don't help setting the mood; and the lack of details (non-descript feels to me like another word for "just picture anything") about other objects don't really help either. Object descriptions are not necessarily the most fun to write, but I think they're very effective at building an atmosphere; for instance I absolutely loved the fact that (Spoiler - click to show)there's pine needles all over the roof and the gutters of the house, which made the forest menacing, and I would have loved more of that!

Anyway, I wished that the atmosphere had been better built-up by the writing, and maybe also that the >dream mechanic had been used in more puzzles, maybe even making it more systematic.