My Best Nightmare

For only $3 this point&click adventure is surprisingly decent, the narrative is unique, the environment has a lot of detail, and it has about 90 minutes of content, which is more than I expected. I think the story had a good mystery, even if I didn't fully understand the concept, something about the dreams bridging reality. There are cool psychological effects in terms of narrative and scenery, overall I think the game was somewhat immersive, but it's not much of a horror experience. I had a few technical problems with the interface, I think the hotspots overall were pretty annoying, I often overlooked areas because the click detection was so narrow, and on top of it, some of the scene transitions were easy to mistake for background. Perhaps you should do some color coding next to the doors and pathways, it would remove a lot of unnecessary frustration. Another thing, if there is an object like a vending machine that is part of the puzzle, the character should comment on it, instead of just having the hotspots, it would highlight the importance of an object. The are several locations in the game where the character has nothing to say on the hotspot that requires an item, and because it's in pixel art, sometimes you have to use your imagination because again, the character didn't comment.

The puzzle gameplay was very basic, find a key, use the key on the door - nothing too interesting, I wish the story played a bigger part in the design of the puzzles. Also, the interactive areas would reset after you left the room, and it's not always clear if playing with the background has a purpose, but it does have a purpose in some locations. There is one area that requires some timing with WASD, I thought it was a bit junky with the visuals, I could not tell what was a platform, luckily it's a very short segment.

Pros:

(+) I thought the game had a good concept for the narrative, while I was not invested in every conversation, at least the idea was different. To be fair, I think the psychological twists were enjoyable in terms of visuals and the interactions between the characters. I liked it, but I didn't love it, not sure why that is, maybe I wanted more suspense, it felt kinda safe if you know what I mean.

(+) As far as the aesthetic of the game, I thought the locations were pretty fun to explore, but obviously, I have some problems with the UI. I think there was a solid attempt to create an atmosphere with the soundtrack and how it was used, but it still feels like you could have done more, sometimes it feels like the area does not have enough sound design.

Feedback:

Hotspots/Pathways/Object detection - sometimes it's not clear where you can go to the next area, of the top of my head, the basement with the tapes, and the right path at the blue tower. The character should comment on all interactive areas, that way you know they are important. Also, I had issues just picking up objects and using them, the hotspots were just a bit too small.

Scenery Reset - I find it strange that game resets the interactive objects that you already discovered. If I already found a hidden door, it should be the default when I come back. Also, you have all these useless objects that you can interact with, if they have no purpose, they should not reset. I also had one softlock, if you talk to the guy in the bar over and over, the game can freeze.

Overall Thoughts: 7/10

I thought the story was interesting, and overall it feels much better than your average $3 game in terms of visuals, but it needs to be more intuitive with hotspots and how it provides information. Again, the concept was compelling, but you probably could have done more with it, I wish the game was a little more intense. With a little more care, I think you could charge $10 for these, and I would not have a problem.

Review by: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/

It's not great. Which is such a shame as parts of this are indeed commendable.
For starters the pixel art is really quite nice. And some of the environments are exotic and otherworldly and impressive, and really help showcase the art. So it takes a good step forward with that.

But this is the game's best asset. The gameplay itself is fairly rote - point and click and pixelhunting. And the puzzles you encounter are all straightforward. They generally all revolve around you clicking around the environment to find an interactable cupboard door which then reveals a key or some other maguffin that allows you to progress to the next area. And at any one time you only have a few areas available to you, so any locked door has a key pretty close by to unlock it. So it's not winning any prizes here for gameplay innovation.

Also the sound is not great. Beyond a few decent tracks, every conversation is punctuated by stupid minion-style jabber noises which grated on me pretty quickly.

But the worst part of it for me was the story. It's poorly translated to start with. Characters always manage to say something that sounds slightly weird and confusing sounding. And sometimes it's not translated at all, with Russia phrases scattered about. And on occasion it's clear the text hasn't been proofread. It's obvious the developer must embed code in the text to slow down display between sentence, because at least once they didn't close out the syntax properly so an interaction just parked 'WAIT 0.5' right in the middle of the flowing text without explanation. I thought at first this weird dialogue and barked coding instructions were wonderfully subversive design choices to add to the uncanniness and weirdness, but the more I progressed and the more random words were just missing from sentences the more it became clear this was not intentional.

And also for a narrative-focused point and click game this is the first I've ever seen a first click causing the game to abort displaying the rest of the slowly scrolling text. The ancient unspoken law of gaming is that you click once to fast display the text, and click again to clear. So many a time the text in a conversation would display, then there's a full stop and a pause, and it feels like the other person has finished speaking. So I then click once because I don't have all the time in the world to wait for the game to autoprogress the text to the next dialogue box. But as I'm doing so they start another follow-on sentence and then that click causes a fast forward to the next dialogue box! So frustrating, I missed more than a couple of sentences in this already confusing nonsense, and losing pieces of the puzzle due to simple UI issues is a big blow to my impression of the game.

So in short, there's nothing really redeeming here. And it's not scary either. Avoid.

Very nice pixelart, but that's pretty much all there is to it. The author should have found a better way to use his artistic talents than this half assed game.
it pits you in very large areas filled to the brim with details. Sometimes when you click on some of them it interacts and trigger a little animation. Some compartments open, some don't. Most of the time it useless, but sometimes it triggers the solution to the next room. You can't tell what is activatable so you have to click on everything. Most of the puzzles require long back and forths between rooms where you find the one object that unlocks the next area. Sometimes the decor doesn't become interactable until you unlock something else or talk with someone. Joy!
The room exits are not always easy to identify, Some of them are placed so close to each other you can click on the wrong one by mistake or they're hidden in places where you would have no idea to find them.
The story is a low effort "it's all a dream" thing and most of the characters' lines are puerile one liners.
But the worst part is the dialog window, the text appears very slowly with a very annoying animation and if you try to speed it up, the dialog just disappears so you can't read what was written.
Icing on the cake was when the game put me in an awful janky platformer sequence where you have to escape something by finding the invisible platforms and clicking on them while moving.

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