The Cheesiest Of All Hidden Object Games
There’s a bit of Ed Wood to Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir. Whenever it gets down to telling a story, it’s hilariously awful. The script, animations, facial expressions, everything: they are all pulling in the same so-bad-it’s-good direction as Plan 9 From Outer Space. One scene involving a giant cat has me in stitches every time I watch it.
I’m not sure I could tell you whether Joindots GmbH is doing it intentionally. My guess is not, but I’m not confident. Regardless, we’re left with the gaming equivalent of a B-movie, and I had a big old grin on my face for much of it.
Mr Sandman, Give Me A Dream
When Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir is not being a hysterical car crash, it’s a hidden object game. It’s also a sequel to Dreamscapes – The Sandman, which we haven’t personally played. From what we can gather, The Sandman, Laura and her husband, Tim, were all in that first title. We never felt like we missed out by failing to play the first game.
The story goes something like this: The Sandman is a dream-villain who has the powers of Freddy Krueger (minus finger-blades) and the looks of Obi-wan. He’s jumped into the mindscape of Tim, who is in a coma. The Sandman’s slightly odd motivation is that he wants to turn Tim into a Mini-Me Sandman. Laura would have attempted to save Tim herself, as she has oneiric powers, but she can only use them on someone else. Which is where you come in. You are catapulted into the dreams of her husband in an effort to rescue him.
I’m confident that I wouldn’t want anyone rooting around in my dreams. As Monty Python would say, “let’s not go, it’s a silly place”. I certainly wouldn’t want my wife going anywhere near them. But head in there you must. Tim is dreaming about moments that are important to him, like the crash that made him comatose, some pre-teen trauma, and – inexplicably – a polar outpost.
He Likes To Push A Pram A Lot
Hopping from dream to dream is a cracking set-up for a hidden object game. The genre’s not known for its fantastical backdrops and freewheeling imagination (we’ve lost count of how many laboratories and fantasy huts that we’ve explored). But Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir immediately gets onto the right foot: you’re exploring weird dream collages, full of giant spiders, Mogwai-like creatures, giant mousetraps and floating islands.
Hidden object games often forget that you’re having to stare at the same backdrops for minutes on end, so having some variety baked in is lovely. It also means that the lightweight point-and-click stuff is enhanced. You’re getting slightly more outlandish items than usual, and are using them in scenarios that you might not expect. Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir seems to be aware of how well it suits this side of the hidden object triangle, so spends more time on it than most.
That time is taken away from the minigames, and I’m not remotely sad that they’ve been minimised. Minigames can be hit-and-miss, only occasionally hitting upon a new idea. Most of the time, they are mining the same sliding-puzzle, chess-piece veins. There are seven or eight minigames here, and none of them are particularly novel.
There aren’t all that many hidden object scenes either, so perhaps we were too quick to slap the label on Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir. When they do pop up, they’re clear and enjoyable. There are some odd moments where the item has a bonkers name – no, I don’t know what a ‘gaff’ is – and some objects appear multiple times in the scene but Dreamscapes only wants one of them. In one scene, we could count five different ‘ropes’, but they wanted the smallest one, for reasons unknown.
Nightmares And Dreamscapes
The rough edges are present throughout Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir. It’s not got the polish of a mainline Artifex Mundi release. You can lock the inventory so that it’s always onscreen, but a bug with the interface means that you can’t actually use items from it in this state. If you want to know what an item is, then you’re in trouble: a bug means the text is duplicated, making the item name hard to read. And there’s no visual feedback that you are correctly ‘using’ an item from your inventory on a hotspot. You might be off by a few pixels, but the game won’t tell you. An outline on the item would have solved this particular problem.
It makes Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir great to look at, but clumsy to play. The simple interactions are bogged down in slowness, inaccuracy and a lack of the quality-of-life features that we have come to expect.
Which brings us neatly to the story stuff. Ho boy, Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir is just dying to be played by a live-reaction streamer. It’s inadvertently hilarious across the board. Whether it’s the repeated sexual innuendo of Tim ‘coming’ in his dream, the zombie-like faces that Tim pulls, or the bargain basement Jeremy Irons impression from the The Sandman, Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir is treat after treat.
Ramshackle, Corny, and Surprisingly Fun
Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir is not your average hidden object game. Some of its qualities are intended, like a joyful dreamworld, and some of them are unintended, like acting so corny that it gives off a pungent whiff. Sure, it could have done with some spit, polish and sophistication, but where’s the fun in that? Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir is at its best when it’s ramshackle.
Important Links
A New Victim Awaits In Dreamscapes – Nightmare’s Heir – https://www.thexboxhub.com/a-new-victim-awaits-in-dreamscapes-nightmares-heir/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/Dreamscapes–Nightmares-Heir/9ND472WN92TT
