Posted on: October 14, 2023
mdqp
Verified ownerGames: 1941 Reviews: 70
It Was All A Dream, And A Waste Of Time
Let me shout it from the rooftops: this game's story is BAD. What starts off as an intriguing sci-fi adventure, which gets weaker with a few stumbles through the middle, turns into a banal story of someone who's made it all up to cope with their own traumas, born from being too selfish toward their friends and family, after a car incident. There is no point in discussing gameplay, presentation or plot (although I'll remark how everything gets worse after the twist). There is barely a character arc in here, shoved near the end, and there are no consequences (either from the "dream plot" or to the fact that the protagonist was absent in important times for her family all to chase her "secret" writing career). You perform some apologies (mostly in your head) and everything is fine and dandy. Wouldn't you know it? Your friend didn't even die in the car accident! It's all weak and perfunctionary. I always had a soft spot for the old adventures by Animation Arts. They might not be perfect, but they had personality, and understood how to put together good set-pieces to keep you interested to the story, even if they might have been a bit silly or otherwise flawed at times. I was looking forward to a return to form, but instead this might be when I stop caring about the company. The puzzles were nice (only a couple of negative outliers, but nothing actually bad), and the production values good enough for such a game, but what good does it all do if they pull off the "it was all a dream" in such a lazy way? The way it's handled is terrible (while it's obvious that something is "off", there is no good foreshadowing), and doing it so close to the end meant there was simply no way to actually develop a plot with the time left. Instead you get some cringy cliches about regrets and making amends (mostly in her mind so far, I can't stress this enough). Don't buy this. If it was even slightly worse I'd ask for a refund after finishing it.
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