Lucid Dream – Review
Follow Genre: Point and click adventure with puzzles
Developer: Dali Games
Publisher: Dali Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC

Lucid Dream – Review

Site Score
8.0
Good: Fun gameplay, good soundtrack, beautiful graphics
Bad: Music is repetitive, objects sometimes hard to find
User Score
7.7
(6 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 7.7/10 (6 votes cast)

After a successful Early Access period on Steam, the full release of the adventurous point and click game with a twist, called Lucid Dream, is available now. Introducing their first ever title, indie developer Dali Games gives us a dream world with an Alice In Wonderland-like feel and the opportunity to interact with numerous interesting characters such as Mr. Moon and Oneiromancer. Let’s take a look at this handcrafted, colorful adventure and if it could be the new game of your dreams.

Story

Lucid Dream follows a young girl in a wheelchair called Lucy, who spends most of her time in her room. Her mother is sick and she’s desperate. When entering the world of dreams, Lucy can magically walk again and tries finding a way to save her mother. On her mission she visits various places and meets lots of different characters.

The developers have painted a beautiful picture to accompany the game. You soon learn Lucy’s mother suffers from mental illness, introducing an important theme. You quickly feel sympathy for the young daughter, who also seems to be struggling with her own problems. The way you get reminded of the mother, and how she is depicted, only makes this sympathy grow, keeping you interested in the story and thus the overall game.

Graphics

The game has beautiful and appealing 2D graphics. The contrast between the actual world and the dream world is made very clear, since Lucy’s house is rather depressing and has a quite dark atmosphere and the dream world is a lot more colorful and contains lots of elements of surrealism. Throughout your journey in the world of dreams, you’ll discover various places, which all have a polished look. The characters you encounter all have their own unique characteristics and looks. The items you gather appear in your inventory drawn on a piece of paper, fitting in with the feeling of the game.

Sound

Different tracks are used throughout the game. Even though the music fits the atmosphere of the game perfectly, it gets repetitive rather fast. This gets in the way a little when you focus on it too much. Luckily the puzzles presented in the game will demand most of your attention, making the music more of a background feature. There is no voice acting anywhere to be found in the game, instead conversations are being displayed through text.

Gameplay

Lucid Dream is a point and click adventure game with challenging puzzles. The game provides you with a total of thirteen levels. There are three difficulty settings available; sleepwalker, dreamer, and dream interpreter. The differences between the three difficulties are whether or not the key items are highlighted and how many clues are given.

You’ll start your journey in your own room, so this is where you start collecting your first clues. Every new place you enter has a few puzzles you need to solve in order to move on. You have to collect key items in your inventory, which you can then use to solve puzzles, interact with objects in your environment, or combine with other key items. You’ll solve some puzzles effortlessly but others will provide some challenge. Maybe you overlooked some small detail or forgot to pick up an item that didn’t immediately catch your eye? Don’t give up too fast!

It may still happen that you get stuck of course. For those moments, you can fall back on your diary. The diary uses drawn pictures to keep track of the clues you’ve found. The puzzles you have to solve next are blacked out. If you need a little help, you can use an eraser so the clue shows itself. Fair warning though; since the clues are all drawings, you might need some time figuring out what they mean with the presented drawing. Of course, you can’t just erase the black areas in your diary at any given time. You only get a number of erasers, depending on the difficulty setting you opted for. And even then, there will be a countdown on the blacked out page, indicating how long it takes until a new eraser becomes available. The idea of having to wait before you can possibly unlock new clues is a nice addition, making sure you put enough time into solving puzzles on your own.

When pointing and clicking where you want to go, footsteps will be your cursor. However, these footsteps will always point towards the left, even when you’re walking to the right. This seems like a little detail but it catches your eyes since it doesn’t seem logical.

Conclusion

Overall, Lucid Dream is an amazing game. The atmosphere of the game is supported by the beautiful, handcrafted graphics and suiting music. The gameplay is simple and the puzzles will put you to the test. It’s too bad the music gets so repetitive and that some items are a little too well hidden, causing you to overlook them quite easy. Besides these little demerits, Lucid Dream offers a great gameplay experience with many fun puzzles to solve.

 

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Rating: 7.7/10 (6 votes cast)
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Lucid Dream - Review, 7.7 out of 10 based on 6 ratings
Maui Vindevogel


23 year old based in Belgium with a passion for writing

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