‘The Dream Machine’ is a game whose concept is built around entering people’s dreams and exploring their unconscious. The selling point of this particular point and click is its artstyle - environments and characters are physical objects created by artists using materials such as clay and cardboard. It is reminiscent of adventure titles like ‘The Neverhood’ or ‘Armikrog’, although it is distinct enough to stand on its own and be instantly recognizable. The visual side is also the strongest point of the title - the levels are wonderfully realized with the enchanted forest being the absolute highlight, both in its scope and detail. The character models are equally impressive - I can’t really think of anything similar in the gaming world. There is one, quite significant, chunk of the game that takes place in a level looking like taken out of the movie ‘Cube’ which left me unimpressed, but other than that the presentation is very strong and often I found myself looking around the levels, appreciating all the little details the artists left for the player to enjoy.

Does the story support the impressive visuals? Mostly yes. The plot is chiefly a pretext to throw Victor, the protagonist, into other people’s dreams, but what kept me engaged until the very end was the wide array of well-written NPCs that Victor encounters during the 14 or so hours it takes to finish all six chapters, my favorite being a knight who doesn’t realize he died centuries ago. I was really surprised at how dark the game gets as it progresses, with flashbacks into Edie’s past evoking the strongest emotional response. This didn’t prepare for the ending, however, which features perhaps the most disturbing scene I’ve ever encountered in a video game. I did feel at times like the final chapter was rushed and too much content was squeezed into too few levels and I definitely would’ve liked more space to fully process the last hour which was very abstract and filled with inventive metaphors.

Another thing that all point and click adventures have in common is the inclusion of puzzles. And in ‘The Dream Machine’ they’re quite uneven. There were a number of times where I felt like they were too obtuse and required scanning every single pixel on a given level. Some of them required re-learning how to use specific objects - an example I can give without hopefully spoiling too much is when finding a book for the 4th time or so the game expects the player to figure out he’s capable of tearing a page out of the book, while in the previous instances of using this type of object it was never possible. Also, some puzzles - especially towards the end of the game, where a larger portion of the game opens up - required quite a bit of going back and forward to get very little done. At one point Victor receives an object that he can use to manipulate his size - this was fun at first, but got tiresome very quickly and I was looking for a way around the level where I could use it as little as possible.

I need to mention a couple of technical problems that the game unfortunately isn’t devoid of. I’ve encountered two permanently corrupted save files (out of ten slots available) which is quite a serious error in any game, however the autosave feature in ‘The Dream Machine’ is quite generous and seemed to be working fine. The game also had problems running smoothly on my Steam Deck - the animations would sometimes freeze for a moment before continuing, the dialogue appearing on screen (the game isn’t voiced) also would appear and disappear in too few frames making it less fluid than it should’ve been.

A half-star? Yes, in spite of this game's promising start, and because there's a reason that “betrayal” is at the bottom of Dante's vision of hell. The early chapters of “Dream Machine” built up tension as the curtain of normalcy gave way to creepy shenanigans and dream-dives ended in short bursts of macabre violence. But it went too far in the insulting, misguided finale by using abortion as a metaphor for self-actualization - a nasty, regressive, and unforgivable interpretation of the biblical Paul: “when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Oh, hey. It's that game you heard about from the early indie boom and then forgot about because it was episodic and the last episode took literal years to come out.

Final judgement? Absolutely worth the wait, the game taking its claymation and cardboard aesthetics down a grimy, desaturated path that instantly becomes a look so singular it could not be mistaken as anything but itself. Rough, cubist faces and skillfully kludged environments are punctuated with lovingly crafted, abrupt stop-motion movements and restrained sound design that perfectly fits the borderline oppressive air the game carries.

The Dream Machine is not a whimsical game, despite the focus on dreams and clay. It is, instead, about grim realities, pasts that cling, futures that terrify and the choices we make, big and small, our lives unfurling around them. It's a game that doesn't so much as go for the emotional jugular as it places its teeth against it. There's little in the way of easy heartstring tugs here, emotional jumpscares that aim for easy points. Just a relentless, somber background noise made all the more poignant by the color-sapped stillness of its eerily unreal architecture and the unavoidable feeling that you are being irrevocably drawn into the end.