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In it you’ll play as a young boy who is hoping to save his lost family, and the rest of his village, after they’re all overcome by a mysterious illness. Hoping to find Lady Death he sets out on a perilous journey alone. What follows is a progression of relatively straightforward puzzles and standard platforming, moving things into position to get higher, avoiding deadly traps and monsters, and typically doing a fair amount of dying along the way. Along the way you do acquire a small collection of powers, whether shifting between realities or creating a clone of yourself, but since these are on a limited gauge they telegraph themselves. If you see potions around you can assume you’ll need to use these special powers, and while they offer up some variations on the relatively simple puzzles they don’t tend to be very inspired. What plagues the experience most, aside from a just-slightly-too-slow pace, is the pretty cheap nature of many of its traps mixed with the visual design. A layer of murk overlays everything you see and that, in combination with obstacles in the foreground, results in far too many lame deaths. The problem is that these are so common they’re pretty obviously by design and they just end up serving to aggravate since they waste time. Throw in odd clipping bugs I ran into more than once and even though there are moments in the game that work it’s more often exasperating that exhilarating. Even if its technical issues were removed Dream Alone would still be challenged to compete with the abundance of contemporaries already on the console. In light of the fact that both Limbo and Inside are going to be on the Switch as well not even the visual style helps it to be unique, let alone the fact that both are better executed on almost all levels as well. If you’re really hard up for something dark and moody you may find it worthwhile but otherwise there are better options out there.
Justin Nation, Score:Bad [4.5]