What an enormous waste of potential. The puzzles seem like a nice idea at first, to give the game more “gameplay”, but what they really do is trivialize the environments: now these are not spaces to inhabit and explore, they’re just transitory spaces, a mere process with no weight whatsoever. Dream Diary isn’t about wandering dreams and finding their meaning, but about platforming and puzzle solving. One could say that this doesn’t really matter, as the mysterious environments are still there, but the interest the game has on puzzle solving makes itself lose focus. Focus on finding the meaning of dreams and how we relate to them to give the spotlight to dull puzzles that become annoying more than they should, and even sometimes set pieces that add mostly nothing meaningful. The game could have made use of the dream diary you can check in the real world to reveal secrets or give hints at some puzzles, that way the game could have made the mechanical representation of the relation between oneself and their dreams, but instead the dream diary is just a bunch of pretty cool artwork, but meaningless in the long run. The puzzles themselves sometimes can be pretty easy, but sometimes they’re so vague that you’ll find yourself walking aimlessly with no direction for more than an hour just to find the missing piece in a really evident but badly indicated way, or trying things that you might think could work but not really. I could put up with the tedium if at least the puzzles were interesting, but no, most of the time they’re just: “go here and give this NPC a key item”, “go here and play the flute with these specific inputs” or “go here and interact with the environment a little”. Seen one, seen all of them.

This game is a mess, and it’s a big shame, because when the game wants it can throw you some pretty beautiful and, why not, evocative scenery at the rythm of a melancholic tune, and you can see some of sparks of greatness here and there, but the mix between 2D and 3D platforming and puzzle solving doesn’t seem to do any favor to any of the ideas on display. The dreams, their visual detail, their meaning, the blur in the far off distance giving the sense of endlessness, the moment where you stop to watch an erratically moving object in the night sky with three other people, sitting on the train with some bizarre creature, the feelings of loneliness, vastness and discovering oneself inner fears, the beauty of all of these things is gone when they’re just background noise and not the core of the experience. What a shame.