Review: Dreamless (Nintendo Switch) – Pure Nintendo
“To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?”
Not bad, eh? I didn’t know I had in me. (OK, so I have it in my volume of Shakespeare’s works on the bookshelf; but it is the best thing about this whole article.)
Our game today is called Dreamless, and it’s a quaint, little entry in the horror genre. Let’s take a look.
The visuals (always important in horror games), are mostly OK. The graphics are high resolution and well rendered. The use of realistic lighting and a digital camera “night vision” (or low light imaging setting) give the player some flexibility while walking around in the dark.
The elements you encounter are, for a horror genre game, rather limited and tame. Even the jump scare elements are a bit predictable, scarce, and not very scary.
Audio is likewise mostly OK. The sound effects are well placed and are of good quality. Some of the sounds are a bit repetitive, but not obnoxiously so. There is very little in the way of dialogue, so most of what you hear is the sound of the wind in the trees, creaking floorboards, and some moderately eerie background music.
“So far, the review is a bit lackluster, David. What else can you tell us about this game?” Well, I’m glad you asked, because I’d like to address how well the game functions. For the most part, it works fine. You can walk around, pick up some things, and press a button to read text in a clear format. Moving around is smooth and doesn’t have the exaggerated sway of some of the older first person POV games.
Unfortunately, there were a couple things which were less than pleasant. I looked at some footage online to confirm a suspicion; it seems there should be an inventory of items you are carrying, but I was not able to access this feature on my Switch. There were also some points where your character clips objects. It wasn’t frequent, and the incursions were not significant, but it causes the game to feel a bit off.
Now, for the last part—does it play well? There are some elements which are well constructed. Unfortunately, they have not been assembled into a pleasing whole. What we have is a horror genre game which doesn’t really instill much suspense, and even less horror.
The dialogue is modestly creative, the story is not well fleshed out, and for a game supposedly set in the US, the delivery of the dialogue comes with a rather pronounced Russian accent.
Dreamless has an intro scene and two major levels. There are only a couple of easy puzzles to solve and a lot of walking around looking for things. The objectives are very specific, so you will be walking around the same set of rooms several times before you collect all of the objectives for the level. After a while, it gets a bit tedious.
I progressed through Dreamless not with a sense of engagement, but with the vain hope it would get better. As much as I don’t want to have to say it, one of the more apt descriptors I can give this game is the dreaded B word: boring. Sorry about that, but I can’t really recommend this one.
