Daydream: Forgotten Sorrow Review (fgrsowwor)
"Recreate the feelings and emotions we had as children" - well, you certainly succeeded with this in my case.
Playing this game gives me the same feeling of dread, not knowing what to do, feeling railed into actions but not given clear goals and - being punished all over again. Not really something I want to revisit in my Me-time...
So, after playing twice for some hours I couldn't be more frustrated and enraged with this game. As beautiful as it is, I hate this game. I'm still in the second chapter and I've given up.
First, I play the PC version. It is playable, but it took AGES for me to understand I can use the mouse to change between the command circles of Birly. Until then I was totally clueless what exactly it was that made pressing the right mouse button into a command for Birly.
The control is sloppy at best. Throwing Birly isn't consistent. Most of the time he falls down after a very short length - just until he doesn't. This IS connected to the puzzle in the scene, but after two or three short throws in the wrong direction, you start to rule out the right one, because surely that's too far away?!
This is 2D-perspective, kinda, and it is hard to gauge if you've got the right angle for anything. It is also forced perspective. This means there can be objects obscuring my chars (which is especially nice when you have to blindly jump off something), or make them tiny compared to the scene.
Sometimes you miss exits because the lighting makes them hard to see - but okay, most of the time the scenes are as simple as enter left- exit right.
And that's exactly what you do most of the time - enter left, run to the right. Sometimes two or three scenes long, where there's nothing happening - if you don't count looking at the very nice graphics, but I could do that on artstation, too.
At the start, you get vague hints in form of red flags/handkerchiefs/fabric waving at a POI. But not always, certainly not if you are stuck. There also aren't additional hints if you are stuck - throwing a bottle around on a ledge between two doors doesn't tell me I'm supposed to throw it at that picture of a lighthouse, and oooh, it is not a PICTURE, it is supposed to be a glass window! How about just giving hints like "Maybe throw that elsewhere"? So I'm at least certain I'm supposed to throw that thing instead of, say, hit Birly over the head with it???
And why is Birly totally capable to climb about broken stairs two times, but the third time I have to throw him over? Consistent behaviour, anyone?
And let's not talk about the bugs. Or, let's do it. Grabbing the locking mech in the window floor room somehow made Birly and me swing on it 270° to the left. We hovered over the stairs, but letting go made us fall down.
Or the one time where I climbed onto a cage lieing on its side, and climbing down I somehow fell to my death?
Or when Birly got stuck on high places and didn't come back down?
It's a visually pleasing game, but it is just too frustrating for me.