I'm listening to Blondie sing "One Way or Another" on the free satellite radio I get with my crap TiVo service, thinking about how much time and money I wasted on the Dreamfall game I bought last Friday, and how good Debbie Harry still is. Isn't it weird that you can't rewind songs on the TiVo?
Anyway, speaking of Tivo, here's my Dreamfall review:
The game seemed pretty cool at first. After all, any game that starts out with a good-looking college chick in her underwear can't be all bad. You seem pretty young to be searching for that kind of fun. Does your mother know that you're out?
It took me awhile to get the UI to work properly. Its default set-up is extremely difficult to use. It took me awhile longer to get used to working with the still-odd user-interface. What's wrong with the tried-and-true Quake/Doom/Unreal UI, anyway? Do these developers have a new thing that they want to foist on us? Are they really smarter than the boys at Id were?
But I did get used to the UI, and I did enjoy the first half of the game immensely. Just when I started thinking "this is getting tedious," there were a couple of really cool plot changes. Then the game took over....
It turned into a game where you got to solve a puzzle, then watch a bunch of long cut-scenes. Then another puzzle. Then a lot of long cut-scenes. I was watching a cut-scene when it hit me: "I don't know why I'm playing this game. I don't have any control over the plot."
And that's it. When you talk to someone, you can choose how you start the conversation. But it always ends the same way. This is like an interactive soap opera. It ain't bad, but you don't get to control anything. It's like watching TiVo. You get to pause it when you want. You can rewind, and fast-forward through the commercials. But you can't change what happens on the screen. This game does have one thing TiVo doesn't--at least in the package I bought. It came with all the music on a separate CD so you can listen to it over and over if you want to. Too bad that I don't listen to that kind of music often.
Spoiler Start...
You get to control three characters. One of them is April's enemy, who was contracted to kill her. But early on in the course of playing him, you get the feeling that he's going to come around to the good side, and that you're going to assist him in his voyage of discovery. Alas, that is not to be the case. Instead, you have to either use him to kill the good guys, or not be able to progress in the plot.
Then in the last few chapters, it starts to get mysterious. Things happen that you expect to find out about before the end. But when you reach the end, your questions aren't answered. Faith spends the whole game telling you in a spooky voice, "Find April. Save April." But at the very end, when you expect to somehow save April, you find out that April really did die. When you expect to save Faith, you find out that you don't have a choice: Faith has to die. I like to feel good when I've finished a game. It's bad enough to know the game is over. It's worse knowing all the bad guys are still alive and the good guys are dead.
...End of spoiler.
When you win this game, you lose it. And you don't have a choice. There are many places in the game that choice and chance are mentioned. But by the end, you find out that in the world created within this game, there is only fate for its player. No chance, and no choice. They could have improved this game by allowing you to win it. They could have improved the game by allowing you to control the plot by what you do. Instead, they took a reasonable short-story with a bad ending, and put some puzzles between the chapters to give you something to do.
In games, both the journey and the destination are important to me. I think I play them just to get immersed into a fantasy world for awhile. I did find this game very immersive for awhile, but its ending left me feeling empty. I realize the end was supposed to make me buy the sequel. But after it left me feeling so flat, I think I'll pass. Sorry if I spoiled the game for you. But if it's any consolation, it's spoiled for me, too.
And now on TiVo radio: Well his sister grew up and she married a man. She gave him a son, oh yes, a lovely son. They dressed him up warmly and they sent him to school. They taught him how to fight to be nobody's fool. Oh what a lonely boy...
Come to think of it, maybe no rewind is a blessing in disguise.
Here's another review that I liked and agreed with.
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