If you boiled this down to the actual game, it would be about 15 to 20 minutes long probably. No puzzles really so it's a stretch to even call it an adventure game, but a somewhat interesting story and quite high production values for when it was made might make it worthwhile spending the 20 minutes if you got the game for free like me. But obviously you couldn't sell a 20 minute long game for the inflation adjusted price of something like $300 in 1993 money. So they padded this minimal experience out by first, forcing you repeatedly to walk back and forth and back and forth -- very slowly -- across the same few screens (including up three very long flights of steps making up otherwise empty screens), mostly to talk to a couple characters who are separated as far as possible within the game world. Then towards the end they added in one of the most obnoxiously stupid and unfair mazes in gaming history. Walking back and forth slowly and the maze make up at least 90% of the playtime, and even with that padding it's only a few hours long. There is just very little substance here at all.
Like I'm sure the overwhelming majority of people who own this on GoG, I got it for free during one of their sale giveaways. Free was the right price. It's fun for maybe an hour or two at the most, but by that point you've seen everything the game has to offer and you realize from that point on it's just an endless grind running basically the same levels over and over to scrounge together enough gold to get one of the upgrades, of which there are few with a huge amount of levels per each, with each marginal level upgrade making no discernible difference to your stats, and the price for all upgrades going up every time you buy one. It's just an endless grind, and the core gameplay, while fun a few times certainly isn't fun enough to do over and over hundreds or thousands of times.
Judging from the achievement percentage completion (almost all of this games achievements are story based), I gave up on this about a third of the way through. I'd had enough at that point. This game is competently made from a graphics, U/I, basic functionality and presentation standpoint, enough so to at least keep me slogging through a third of it. So I won't give it 1 star. But, really, it has very little to recommend it. Cyberpunk is about as tired a genre as zombies or superheroes and steampunk. The mush is annoyingly repetitive. But the biggest problem is how completely random and nonsensical the puzzles are. And as many reviewers have noted, the random, pointlessly convoluted solutions a number of times force your character -- who is clearly not meant to be a villain -- to be an evil sociopath. A character has an item you need. So you arrange to have him murdered and loot his corpse. A guy on a boat is listening to a loud radio, and can't hear you calling him. So instead of, oh I don't know how about picking up a random piece of the garbage on the street you're surrounded by and throwing it at him, you BURN HIS HOUSE DOWN. The whole story is set in motion because you stole your girlfriend's, who is wanted by the police, credit card and used it all over town, allowing the police to locate her.
This game has great atmosphere and a cool story with a meta, 4th wall breaking theme, which is done often but rarely in an intelligent and interesting way as it is here. In those elements, Bad Dream: Fever is decidely superior to Bad Cream: Coma. But, man, the gameplay is bad. It's such a shame, because with less incredibly frustrating gameplay it would be 4 or 5 stars probably. As it is, I can't recommend it. The gameplay is basically this, over and over. There are a handful of locations and a number of separate areas within each of these locations. They're all filled with random items all over the place. You can't interact with any of this stuff until you reach a point in the game where you need a specific item, usually only having a vague idea what item will actually be usable in the sometimes moon-logicky solutions to the puzles. Then one random piece of this junk scattered somewhere randomly in the dozens of separate screens becomes clickable and needs to be picked up to advance the game. Over and over, you're told you now need to find, say for example, replacement keypad keys for a security panel. You have no clue where you might find something like that. So you just start going back through all the locations scanning the screen with your mouse pointer like the worst kind of old school adventure game pixel hunting to find some random objects somewhere that you couldn't interact with before but now you can. It's so aggravating. And sometimes, you don't even need a specific object; you just need to wander around through prior locations until some story beat triggers. It gets so aggravating, that about halfway thru I just kept a walkthrough open all the time while playing, and instead of wandering around scanning every prior locaiton top to bottom just started consulting it pretty much immediately each time I was told I needed to find some random item in some random locaion that previously couldn't be clicked on but now can.
This is basically an arcade game with clumsy controls. There's no story of any significance. You play through small, self contained levels, kill everyone or whatever else the specific destruction objective is, exit the level, do another one. It's like Donkey Kong or Pac Man from 40 years ago in that respect -- one small screen, get through it, do another one -- and that isn't enough to hold my attention in 2021 unless the basic gameplay is really fun. And this game just isn't fun to play. The controls are a major problem. I know the developer has whined about most people abandoning the game before giving themselves a chance to get used to the clunky tank controls. Well, I gave it enough time to realize I was never going to have any fun playing a game that controls like that.
Most of the really old games I've gotten for free from GoG have been unplayably terrible. They're free for a reason usually, so no surprise there really. This one, however, was actually surprisingly good. For a 25-year old game, the graphics and animation are excellent, a lot better than the large majority of the recent pixel art point and click adventure games. The story in Dragonsphere was well done, and at least for the first part of the game, the puzzles were too. About halfway, through (at the point you reach the sorcerer's tower), the puzzles just go completely in the toilet. It was worth playing through to the end for me to wrap up the story, but at a certain point I mostly gave up on trying to decipher the game designers' moon logic and/or obscure pixel hunting clues and just went straight through to the end with a walkthrough open.
This was pretty solid through the first major island area. Nothing too special, but decent story, reasonable puzzles, okay voice acting, mildly amusing writing. The music is awful and loud and constant, but things got much more tolerable when I just shut the music off, although since there are very few sound effects besides voices, the game gets oddly silent without music. Then you get to the second major area, Sloth Island, which is just an awful design mistake. The whole map is a deliberately confusing maze, so just getting around and finding your way to rooms with something in them you can do is a serious annoyance. It even has an actual maze towards the end, which has never not been terrible in the whole history of adventure games. The puzzles in this part are ridiculous, completely nonsensical from start to finish. The game's inventory is badly done, and it gets worse and worse the further you get in the game, so that's also a hassle in this second part. Nothing you pick up ever gets dropped, even when it has no more use, and you can only view four items at a time on the screen, so you constantly have to scroll through an increasing pile of junk to try to find the item you need. If you want to play this game, I suggest not bothering to try figuring out Sloth Island. Go step by step from a walkthrough from that point until the end of the game, as I eventually did just to get through the story. Once you get to Sloth Island, you've exhausted the good gameplay parts of this.
Every time I tried to play this I lasted about 15 minutes before getting severe motion sickness -- cold sweat, dizzy, close to throwing up. There's a severe problem with the way the UI/graphics are done in this game for me (and I've checked around, and learned I'm not alone) that makes it unplayable. I suspect the problem may be that there is a crosshairs (a little white circle) that only appears when you're not walking or running. So your brain fixes itself on that circle to orient you, then you start moving, and it disappears, and your brain is confused. Then you stop, it reappears, and your brain re-fixes itself on it and reorients you in space. Oriented, lost, oriented, floating, oriented, confused, constantly on and off like that, I think might be the reason I can't play this without getting sick. I don't remember ever dealing with another game that did this, and there is no option available to disable to disappearing crosshairs every time you start moving.
I'm sure there are lots of people who find this aspect of the game enjoyable, but it's driving me crazy that every time I've checked a walkthrough to try to figure out where I went wrong -- since I keep running into brick walls where I can't seem to advance anything -- I find out I've missed like 90% of the story. Way too much information is completely missable through no fault of the player. There is extreme pixel hunting required at crime scenes or else key clues can be completely missed. The VK test, which seems to be a key story element in determining whether characters are human or not, as best I can tell is completely random and can easily be irrevocably failed with no chance to try again. Picture scanning, you have no idea how many key items you are supposed to find in each picture, and they all seem to have random things that turn out to be major clues you could only find by zooming in over and over and over again on every square millimetere of the frame. There's one bit early on where in order to catch a suspect you have to click spastically at one particular moment. There is ZERO feedback or guidance telling you this is required or even possible, but if you don't do it, a whole storyline of the game is lost when he escapes. It's maddening. I suppose the story seems interesting enough that I'll play it through, but I give up trying to figure out on my own what the game expects me to do. I'm just going to have to use a walkthrough and go step by step, scene by scene doing exactly what it tells me to do so I don't miss 90% of the story.
