DreamGallery

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

DreamGallery is a Jigsaw Puzzle game that has players assembling pieces to various photographs with a Chinese theme, in a setting of a Chinese garden. It’s hard to tell the full contents of this game (more on that later), but judging from what I can tell, it seems like there are 36 puzzles in total, with players able to play them in 54-piece and 126-piece modes.

Before going on, I feel there are a few warnings I should get out of the way here. Firstly, this game includes multiple language options, including English, but it defaults to Chinese, which is really frustrating and will require players to muddle through menus to correct it (press the X button to open the Settings menu, then move the top box over until it displays in English). And secondly, as the first problem would seem to indicate, this game overall feels like a really quick and dirty port from PC, and as a result there are multiple points throughout the game where menu options appear to be completely un-selectable.

The pictures you’ll be piecing together in this game are quite beautiful, so long as your definition of “beautiful” is Chinese women in traditional Chinese dress posing in front of Imperial-era Chinese buildings and locations. While these pictures are nice, I have to say they present an extreme lack of variety. In addition, completed pictures have animations, but these animations are all pretty low-quality and cheapen the otherwise classy presentation these photos have.

As mentioned above, these pictures are pieced together in a setting depicting a pool in a Chinese garden, and while the resolution here is very good and there’s some nice detail here, the framerate between transitions is atrocious, the shadows are really rough-looking, and the little animals the game has wandering around the puzzle as you work on it are so poorly-rendered that the game would have been better off without them.

In keeping with the Chinese theme, gameplay is accompanied by gentle music using traditional Chinese string instruments, which is a great fit for the game but it gets repetitive pretty quickly.

There are more problems too. The controls in this game are sluggish and a great cause for frustration – it’s far too easy to move past the spot you were aiming for using the control stick, and it often feels like it takes too long to shuffle through spots using the D-Pad. What’s more, when you place a piece, it goes through a time-consuming animation, with a different animation when you have placed the piece in the correct spot (the fact that it does this seriously cuts down on any difficulty this game might have).

Yet for all its excesses that add nothing like the fake-looking animals, tacky animations, and ugly screen transitions, this game fails to include features you would think should be a given in this sort of game. It doesn’t keep track of the time it takes players to finish puzzles, or show any time at all. There’s no touchscreen support. You can’t control how zoomed-in you are to the puzzle, and you can’t place pieces while zoomed in. And all of this game’s puzzles are sequentially locked, meaning you can’t play any of them until you complete the previous one, and you’re not even shown blank spots for the ones you haven’t unlocked yet.

Because of this last bit, the only way I can get a full accounting of how many puzzles this game has would be to play through every one of them, and this game is so frustrating I’m not going to do that. However, judging by the menus, it looks like the puzzles are separated into four “stories”, with each “story” having nine puzzles, for the total I came to above, 36. Even for a game that sells for a budget price of $6, that is really stingy, and if the game didn’t pad out its run time with its countless time-consuming animations, I’d say that players would be able to easily breeze through this game’s contents in a few hours.

DreamGallery does have some good content here – as I said, the photos you’re piecing together are, themselves, quite lovely, even if they are lacking in variety. However, this is a sloppy port that has busted menus, frustrating controls, graphical flourishes that detract from the experience instead of adding to it, a lack of features, and a terrible lack of content that provide a poor value even for the low price this game sells for. And all of that is if you can get past the game’s menus all being in Chinese by default. If you are a fan of jigsaw puzzles, you may be able to look past this game’s many, many flaws to find something to like here, but for most players this is absolutely a game you’ll want to skip.

tl;dr – DreamGallery is a Puzzle game that has you piecing together photographs of Chinese women in traditional dress, while in a Chinese garden. The photos themselves are very nice, though they lack variety. However, this game is flawed in countless other ways, including terrible controls, faulty menus, terribly lacking options, and a severe lack of content. And what’s more, the game’s default language is Chinese, forcing English-speaking players to muddle through until they can find the English-language option. For all but the most diehard fans of jigsaw puzzles and Chinese culture, this is a game not worth playing.

Grade: D-

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