Genre(s): Art/artsy, puzzle
Credits: Cockroach Inc., 2010-present (still in beta) (2011 IndieCade Festival Finalist)
Psychology meets art meets drama meets horror meets retro—with this kind of mash-up, of course the game's an IndieCade finalist, but fundamentally, all of these factors boil down to a single beautiful quality. The Dream Machine is a master of mood—something that's easy to overlook by players and designers alike, but when you think of your favorite games, you'll always remember the ones that sucked you in.
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| The Neff's lowly apartment, a la claymation decor. |
You star as a certain Victor Neff, going about his business in a brand-new apartment (well, new by familiarity standards) he and his just-married wife acquired yesterday. You sleep, you wake up, you walk around the house, set up for breakfast, eat, talk to the landlord, and get into an argument with the furniture movers. In essence, this is the (spoiler-and-dramatic-excitement free) story—of The Dream Machine's first chapter.
Besides the fact that (a) currently only the first chapter is free to play and (b) chapters 3, 4, and 5 have not been yet released—as a singular unit of gameplay, the first chapter is cohesive and intriguing enough to be enjoyable on its own, so it alone will be the subject of today's review. Also, trying to review the entire Dream Machine wouldn't necessarily be impractical, but it would be like trying to review the entire sagas of Harry Potter or Star Wars in a few sentences. Of course a common theme evolves across the multiple works, but then you miss out on the quirks and beauty of individual pieces. Let's move on then.
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| Multiple dialogue options allow you to not only gather different information, but also customize Victor's personality. When talking to "my wife," I can be sweet or snobby to her—setting a tone for the relationship and possibly influencing my future dialogue choices. |
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| "Hello handsome!" Apparently so...? At any rate, Victor's dynamic responses to specific items and people make us forget he's a clay doll. |
Instantly you notice the stocky figurines, the sculpted clothes, and the (literally) cardboard boxes. Already you get a sense that there's something odd about this world, aka "a bad feeling about this," that the newlywed couple doesn't realize almost until the chapter's end. The grotesquely retro "clay-mation" and dollhouse scenery create the feel of Saturday morning children's TV programming—innocent, nostalgic—hijacked by a devious mind. When first exploring the apartment, I kept expecting to run into abstract oddities hanging from the ceiling or sprawling over the floor.
But despite its apparent artificiality, Dream Machine humanizes its characters by exploiting a common point-and-click mechanic, dialogue. Every hotspot area is tied to a unique response from Victor, adding in "descriptive paragraphs" elaborating the obvious visuals and giving us some backstory to identify with our player-character. Although you can drag inventory items over other items and area hotspots to solve puzzles, you can also drag them over nonsensical locations to extract more interesting responses ("I already dig myself," Victor wryly comments when a shovel is dragged over him). Occasionally he'll respond "that doesn't seem to work," but even this generic phrase occurs much less frequently compared to other games' point-and-click interactions. Dream Machine gets the dialogue right by making it as player-dictated and interesting as possible.
Although the first chapter is available for free, I highly recommend checking out the rest of the installments if you're liking what you see. Given the chapter's suspenseful(!) end, the future adventures of Victor and Alicia Neff promise a steady, linear increase in psychological adventure. All your save files and data are stored "in the cloud," so if you've got about $20 to spare (via euro exchange rates), invest it in the rest of Dream Machine, support indie game producers, and spend some time with a "transcended" game.
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