The Dream Machine Review (seTTen)
This is a review for the whole game.
I'm was quite speechless for a while. A marvelous masterpiece. Grim and dark in its places, but incredibly artistic.
The art style is phenomenal - walking through all those detailed and vibrant dioramas and experiencing them close up gave everything such a unique atmosphere that I've never really felt in a game before. The music, the sound design and text based dialogue complimented everything very well. Every part coexisted, gave flavor, like a delicious stew.
It was a tricky game. I wish I could say that I managed to solve all the riddles by my own wit. However... I could not figure out how to help the deaf stone head statue. After reading in a Walkthrough that the stirrup, the anvil and the hammer goes into the statue's ear, I questioned how anyone was supposed to figure that out. And so I looked up the anatomy of the ear to see if I could find some kind of resemblance. The so called auditory ossicles consists of three parts; the Malleus (also called the "hammer"), the Incus (also called the "anvil") and the Stapes (also called the "stirrup"). And so you have to place them in the correct order into the statue's the ear. Fascinating! Well played, indeed!
It is a shame you can't really affect how the game ends, considering that you can make choices in the rest of the game that can have different outcomes... In the final part of the game you simply sit through the dialogue and watch how Victor chooses to go forth. Same ending regardless of your choices.
The ending was good, not every story should have a happy ending but it could have been better; had the player been given a choice that affected the final outcome. That either Victor kills the baby and therefore also the machine, that the baby is possessed by the machine, or that Victor is possessed and has to coexist with the machine - which is what ultimately happens, regardless.
However, the ending won't affect my overall judgement of the game, in this case. I love the artistic aspects of the game way too much, and how incredibly well developed the story was, along with its many incredibly clever riddles and puzzles.
Game, 10/10.
Ending, meh, 7/10.
I seriously recommend The Dream Machine, even for people who aren't that much into point-and-click games. I wasn't, until I tried it out.