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.