Dreamo

Genre: First-Person Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Dreamo is a First-Person Puzzle game first released on PC in 2020 and ported to the Nintendo Switch later the same year. Players take the role of a man in a coma who is wandering through various environments in his subconscious solving puzzles involving the placement of spinning cogs on boxes to connect a beginning and ending cog.

Visually, this game looks okay though not in any way impressive. Or at least it does most of the time. Frustratingly, the one time there is an issue with the visuals, it is when you are in the midst of solving a puzzle, when the entire screen becomes distorted. I’m sure this is intended to emphasize the unreality of the situation you are in, but it is extremely disconcerting to try to solve puzzles when what you’re looking at isn’t clear. I should note that these visuals are supplemented by a running dialogue between a man and the woman guiding him through this experience, though the dialogue sounds stilted, poorly-written and woodenly-acted.

Beyond the difficulties caused by this game’s visuals, the gameplay here is fine, and I’d argue even a bit creative. It does take some thinking to figure out how you’re supposed to arrange the cogs to solve these puzzles, though there are usually a limited number of options. Sometimes it’s difficult to see just how you can manipulate these boxes and their attached doohickeys, and it’s frustrating that you have to visually look around for the cogs to attach rather than simply selecting them from a menu. It’s like this game started with a fairly simple but solid puzzle premise and then looked for ways to complicate that premise and make it unnecessarily tedious.

Dreamo has some interesting ideas to it, and the basic puzzles at its core are decent if unspectacular. Unfortunately, problems with the visual presentation and interface make solving those puzzles a great deal more joyless than it should be, and the presentation is awkward and unappealing. Skip this one.

tl;dr – Dreamo is a First-Person Puzzle game that has you wandering a man’s subconscious solving puzzles involving placing spinning cogs on boxes. The core Puzzle gameplay is decent, but the presentation is terrible in a way that makes the gameplay worse, and overall this game seems to take numerous steps to needlessly complicate that core gameplay. The result is a game that’s more frustrating than fun.

Grade: C-

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