Dreamwalker: Never Fall Asleep

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Dreamwalker is a Graphic Adventure first released on PC in 2018, ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2019, and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game puts players in the role of a woman who is an acclaimed psychiatrist and author, a medical doctor, and who also has the supernatural ability to enter patients’ subconscious for some reason. She travels to a small town to try to help a young woman who seems to be suffering a strange illness.

As silly as that story description may seem, I assure you the actual delivery is worse. The writing and dialogue here is terrible bordering on cringe-worthy, and this is not helped by the voice actors’ terrible line delivery or the creepy way the game takes still, hand-painted images of characters and manipulates them into flapping their mouths to talk.

There’s not much to redeem the game in its gameplay either. This game follows Artifex Mundi’s standard formula of looking through multiple still scenes looking for objects to interact with, interspersed with occasional “search for the hidden objects” sections. Unfortunately, the tone and topic matter of this game are at odds with this gameplay – the silly Macgyvering of odd objects while a woman’s sobs can be heard in the background, the way the dream state means that puzzles are often even more nonsensical than they usually are, and the random item hunts that just do not resonate with the serious tone the game is trying to aim for all converge to make something that can’t decide if it wants to be creepy, comforting, clever, serious, or silly.

Sadly, I can’t even say that the Nintendo Switch version adds touchscreen controls here as a silver lining – not only does this game not use the console’s touchscreen, but the control scheme here is unnecessarily convoluted, and exactly the sort of thing that a touchscreen would improve upon.

Dreamwalker doesn’t really have much to offer anyone – as a Graphic Adventure, its puzzles are exactly the sort of absurd sort of nonsense the genre grew out of decades ago, the story and tone is all over the place and impossible to take seriously despite the game seemingly wanting you to take it very seriously, it’s ugly, and it doesn’t even have the common sense to use the strengths of the Nintendo Switch to address the game’s control issues. Even if you enjoy Artifex Mundi’s works, this is a game best avoided.

tl;dr – Dreamwalker has you playing as a woman who is both a psychiatrist and paranormal miracle-worker as she dives into the subconscious of her patients to do absurd, nonsensical, outdated Graphic Adventure puzzles. It’s a game with a cringe-inducingly bad story, terrible controls, and an inability to settle on what sort of tone it wants to have. Even fans of this sort of game are best avoiding Dreamwalker.

Grade: D

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