Sweet Dreams are not made of these – Dream Alone Review

When it comes to horror titles, the indie scene reigns supreme, with games that are overly terrifying to those that make you feel uneasy for the right reasons. It’s a genre of games I absolutely love, so when we get the opportunity to try a horror game I just revel at the chance to piss my pants.

So I’m probably being a little harsh when I say that Fat Dog Games’ Dream Alone is one of the most frustrating games I have ever played next to Ride to Hell.

Dream Alone has you playing as a young boy who is on a journey to meet a powerful witch called Lady Death, who has the cure to save everyone in his town who has fallen into a coma. To get to her, he’ll have to survive deadly traps by travelling back and forth from a dark dimension. It isn’t much of a story but it serves its purpose of explaining what you’re doing and why well enough that you’re not immediately questioning the character’s judgment.

The problem with Dream Alone is its gameplay. The game is a Horror Platformer that borrows a lot from PlayDead’s Limbo with the idea of avoiding things that will likely kill you (in this case – everything) however it misses all the best things about it.

The biggest sin of this is the controls. Players are forced to run from the many things that will kill you by jumping over traps and obsticles, pushing giant boulders to get to higher ground, and escape to another dimension to find a different route or a way to solve the puzzles. However the player speed is a hindrance as the walk/run animation is barely fast enough to avoid traps, and the jump is un-responsive at best, as the jump is slow to move and height or speed doesn’t seem to be affected by any context, such as holding the button longer.

Dream Alone also has another issue with its difficulty curve, where it has none. I have fallen into so many pit traps, bear traps, or unseen traps that were blocked because of some visual cue that I couldn’t see that the game lost its intrigue early on and just became frustrating. As most failures feel like you should walk away from it learning something, Dream Alone’s failures come out of nowhere, forcing you to back-track a considerable distance, and if you take in consideration that a turtle walks faster than the main character’s running speed, you can see where

To make sure that I didn’t just chalk it up to having an off day, I made sure to bring friends in and try the game. It became a game of whose patience could last longer (which was actually more fun than the game itself) but it came down to the point where everyone agreed that the game had plenty of unfair death traps that should have been easily avoided.

To say something good about Dream Alone, I will definitely give it’s visuals some praise while playing it on the TV. The game features a black and white monotone style with old film grain that looks great and makes for some nice screenshots, its decent into the nightmare world only improves the visuals with creepy imagry that was more unsettling and gave the game its horror elements.

At the same time, one can almost say that the visuals were too constraining, as the darkness around the screen could almost engulf the play area, limiting the view point of everything you’re doing. I highly recommend playing it on TV mode if you’re on the Switch as its the only way you’ll know what is going on, as everything on handheld is much smaller and easier to miss.

It might be that I’m a sucker for the Horror genre that I’m criticizing Dream Alone a bit harshly, but everything about the game just rubbed me the wrong way. Everything in Dream Alone has been done before and in fact, done much better.