It is not easy to tell a story. You can have any interesting plot in the talon, but if you can not sell it properly, all efforts will be lost. It is in a very, but powerful, emotion-filled situation that the independent community has a tremendous opportunity to show off its other, commercially unseen face. Lucid Dream is another project with a message that has somehow lost its way.
The unnecessary good idea has been burying the wasteful ballast. And you are trying to engage in perfect references to the tragic destiny of an individual in an arrogant society, where the most important thing is to smile and think positively, because you will not change the past anymore. Give it to any fantasy, it must have a natural attraction in itself. Take, for example, Wadjet Eye Games (most recently Unavowed) - they can create worlds beyond the reach of reality, yet they are believable, and within minutes there is a game wrapped around your finger. Daedalical also had a high buckle though the State of Mind did not go too far. Developers from Dali Games could try something similar with Lucid Dream. But they overwhelm us with an unnecessarily inflamed plot that ultimately only adds new and new names of absurd characters, tasks where you still have to escape and puzzles with extremely frustrating gameplay.
At the same time, it is starting quite well, that is, as far as possible. The melancholy atmosphere will stick to you in the first few minutes and you will not get rid of it until the complete conclusion that comes after 5-6 hours. Lucy is a girl in a wheelchair, living in a household with a mother who is mentally totally out of the ordinary. The death of a husband and daughter with amnesia attached to life on a wheelchair was too great. If you already have enough candy Christmas mood with a smile at every step, start Lucid Dream. Reluctance, depression, melancholy - all in dark colors that do not turn on or light on in the cozy room of Lucy.
Yes, life is occasionally on a fig, and Lucy escapes to her dreams to find a remedy for her mother's sadness and bring back the eye. Mother falls into even greater depression as she walks to the cemetery for her husband and when Lucy leaves her human body and becomes an unresponsive, ferocious box. The point is quite good. Lucy, in a surreal world, she does not need a wheelchair, she runs through bizarre environments, ranging from one strange creature to another, and all to be good again. Returning to the normal world is much more terrible than it would seem.
Even though Lucid Dream has a great job, the storyline falls hard on her mouth. At several levels of split wander, alternates the environment too fast, with a modest area. Interestingly, yes, every one has something in it. But ultimately your goal is just to solve a few puzzles, come to the end, click on a character whose name you can not remember (man with branches like antlers, head of the statue ... and assign to them the names, as Metatron, Ironmancer, etc.) and each of they will send you further. And further. Besides, because there, my dear Lucy, you will find a remedy for your mother's sadness, but sell me a soul, naively throw yourself into increasingly crazy and fantastic mummified dreams. It does not have to make sense, in Lucid Dream it is also the last thing you would look for, but the narrative is then transformed into an incoherent blabbering full of empty phrases. Anything but guaranteed will not interest you.
At least it will look good, with some of the dialogues and bizarre characters, a man who is hungry for some other game to suffer. But Lucid Dream as a 2D adventure is also slightly bouncing around the gameplay side. The puzzles are either fairly simple, you can dump them just because there are only a few items in the inventory and there are not too many active places. Or they are "logical" puzzles, often based on random testing. That the position of the wings owls have shown initially in miniature form on a pole at the beginning of the level and Neven its attention to a few screens further škriabuc the head Have you here on earth, you have to do is Adventurní classic and take it all ten.
But finding a combination of activating eight earthy stones in the right order is already running through a trial-error system. It's fun - maybe for the first time. Or an orgy with portals that open to you after various combinations of switching a particular lever. There are eight portals in a pair on one platform, and it's already done. Try, test, test. And you will come to it. Only the result of the affliction is not the joy of dealing with the problem, but the exhilaration that you finally have that horse from your neck. The original enthusiasm fades, but it always starts by moving to a new environment that can re-establish interest. At least for a few minutes until you fall back into the same ballast frustrating boredom. It often takes longer to find out what your game really wants than the solving of the task itself. Except for shuffled puzzles, which are also muddled due to the control.
You have a mouse, the cursor is changing actively, and if you get tangled, you will receive the help and suggestion of the solution according to the selected complaint at the very beginning of the game. The partially unreasonable decision to limit aid to the player at the outset also applies to active subjects. This is not a prerequisite for using the likes, but only an option. While playing, it is no longer a problem to overlook several small objects. For example, blurring is limited to just a few screens. The Point & Click system does not work exactly, and sometimes it is more difficult to move the cursor to a specific location or the character goes where you want and does not put your body. Some active zones are somewhat inaccurate, but they all make the cursor move across the screen.
Technical processing has its own style and is brilliantly suited for bizarre narration. You do not even have to shake pixel-art, everything is drawn in detail, it's often not alive. Worse animations are animated in a minimalist form. Lucid Dream does not include any dubbing, all the conversations take place exclusively in text form. The more an atmosphere of an old music lining, creating a gloomy atmosphere. Simple melodies can be licked under the skin, and only the central theme with the piano is sufficiently catchy. Selection of the main character as a child - in addition to the truck after the unpleasant incident in the family and subsequent trips to the Worlds full of bizarre fantasies (and remember that drugs are bad), is together with musical motifs exactly what you hold when playing.
But otherwise, Lucid Dream is an ordinary 2D point & click adventure that presents a bit of a haunted, a little crazy, but sad, often unnecessarily stinging story in an attempt to heat up. And the result is the opposite. Lucid Dream is a part of the retreat, which is worth paying attention to, but it can not be expected to be anything but fun for one or two afternoons. For a few weeks, you do not even remember the story of a girl who wants to help her mother out of depression. Nor does the moral lesson help - concluding that even the developers themselves were not aware of what they really wanted to say, and they did not conclude. Even I have one for them: less is sometimes more.
