THIS GAME IS SO NICE! I LOVE THIS
Reviews for "Dreams and Reality"
amazing, this game has a nice calm fell to it, the art is simple and adorable, the music is relaxing and makes you want to experience the game slowly, which goes great with it's "story".
really great job, keep it up! ;)
Simple,inspiring and very motivating,the game play isn't hard - you just need a little patience.
Contragulation for making this game.
This game adds an interesting element to the basic mechanic, common to most of the platformers: instead of just trying to make perfect parabolas with their avatar’s jumps, player is also forced to draw dotter curves and then use the dots for further time-limited jumping. With that said, however, there is not much to do with this interesting new mechanic: the level design is poor and never really challenges player to take full advantage of his ability and draw, for example, a long zigzag curve with many platforms to reach new places and/or avoid obstacles. Instead he is forced to repeat one or two same actions over and over again: draw a 45/60/90 degree ladder, jump platforms as fast as possible, repeat. No new mechanics are thrown at him, and even this one is, in my opinion, greatly underused. This game's 'monochromatic' mechanics combine surprisingly well with its monochromatic visual design, but for the game focused on dreams you are assumed to expect something more. Hopefully, this mechanic will be explored more fully in your future games!
The one gameplay feature that has pleasantly surprised me was the "safe platform" mechanic: each time you fall from a high platform, small white cloud approaches to catch you and bring to the nearest platform. When I've first discovered this little detail, I felt that the designer of the game have actually foreseen some of my actions and incorporated an answer to them in the game. This was a little moment of an in-game dialogue between the designer and the player. With that said, however, the dialog seemed nonexistent when I was exploring the far edges of the level that turned out to be meaningless dead ends.
The music, graphics and animations in the game are very good, but in combination with the monotonous gameplay and level design they feel lulling, rather then reinforcing the feel of wonder. The way the game mechanics try to communicate the core idea about "dreaming small" is interesting: you can't "dream" your "ladder" too high, or else it will fall apart before you will be able to use it. But this message is not clear until the "moral" of the game is revealed at the end. The fact that at the end game have had to explain its message to the player is for me an indicator of the game's weakness: it fails to make its message clear through the gameplay itself, through the very way the player operates within the confines of the game. The dreaming mechanic itself does not resemble actual dreaming and after a while feels like a monotonous action, that you had to repeat over and over again in order to reach the goal. In this sense, the "reality" aspect of the game seems to be more valid than that of the "dreams".
AlceX responds:
Thanks for the review! You really seem to have understood what I was aiming for with the game, and that makes your feedback really useful.
I was not expecting to enjoy this game. Somehow, you managed to win me over. I really enjoyed the literal climbing of your dream bit. And the message was a good reminder on how we should achieve our goals. Seriously amazing!