The viewing for this particular entry was inspired by Backloggd user Rogueliker and their review of this game. I have tried to put as much of this as I can into my own words, but I apologize if there are similarities between the two texts at all.
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Longplay watched
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There's one moment in Dreamweb that briefly explains its appearance on a few disturbing game icebergs. It's also a perfect jumping-off point for many of its shortcomings. This moment comes after the player character, Ryan, has been given the names of the remaining five offenders he is to seek out and kill. One of the names on that list has tried to abscond, but since knowledge is power, so is a bomb discreetly planted on the back of her door. Before you can even get to her, they've done it for you. So you move on to the next target, but there's a slight problem. Her home is tightly secured, meaning a simple break-and-enter is out of the cards. Time for Plan B: you tell Ryan to pour water on a controller panel, and, for some ungodly reason, that causes her security system to nuke itself. You enter the room she's in through a not-so-subtle crater in her wall to find her bifurcated, alive, and too tired to keep crawling. A solid line of blood enters and exits the room as you step in, ironically adorning a fairly lifeless space with a nice splash of color. As you approach her, she begs. The pain is too unbearable. "Send me to the heavens!" she cries. And so Ryan does. Up to this point, the violence in Dreamweb has been absurd and comical, and though that absurdity is still a key element in this scene, something about it feels dirty.

Or, rather, it should. Because instead of just imparting the most important aspect of this scene to you, the game also has to emphasize that this is a righteous kill. So, in the intervening seconds before she begs to be euthanized, she twirls her mustache. You can't know where the other members of her party are, for their mission is greater than her life. They're growing stronger, you see, and this one death will not put a dent in that.

Aside from reading her name off a list, this is the only time you get to interact with this individual. A terminal belonging to Ryan later emphasizes the one quantifiable character trait she had up until you cut her in half and shot her: she was a socialite. How she got inducted into the collective you're hunting, what her position of power means for that collective, what her contributions were—none of this is relevant. What matters is that the game told you to kill her, and you did.

All of your targets in Dreamweb are this shallow. About the most interesting Dreamweb bothers to get with its rogues' gallery is with its first target, a rock star who might be a little too aloof to fully grasp the power he and six others are attempting to mine. This is not the only aspect of his character that makes him the most memorable, though; he also has the most build-up, and the short moments leading up to his death are arguably as interesting as this game gets. Yeah, Dreamweb peaks at a couple of fans hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite promiscuous rockstar in the lobby of the hotel he's currently booked in. Two, and this guy is apparently a huge deal. The world around every other target is never as casual or benign as that. Because this game's idea of escalation is to immediately follow up would-be groupies with the military-industrial complex, it's the only interaction leading up to the final moments of a level that leaves an impact. The only other one that vaguely stands out to me is one from the same level with the military, where going to the backside means shooting an innocuous and unassuming guard in his wrinkly face. This only stands out to me because I recall there was a slight attempt at black comedy beforehand through the use of imparting words, although I struggle to remember what those words were. Not that it matters, anyway—it wasn't all that funny.

My biggest question throughout the longplay I was watching was whether the developers intended this to be funny. Full disclosure: the longplay I watched was of a version that has voice acting, and as you might expect from an Amiga-era graphic adventure that had VA bolted onto other versions, it's not particularly good. I have to assume that this is decidedly less goofy when it doesn't sound like you have the same three people voicing everyone, but even then, a single shot from Ryan's gun is enough to blow up an entire spaceship in one of the later levels. I'm not talking about minor damage; I mean, the thing turns to fucking ashes. The motif this game likes to do where a little ball of energy flies out of the corpses of your targets happens impractically here because the force of your shot alone was enough to disintegrate the bones of your target, and this somehow doesn't splash back at you. This is after a magical gem given to you by your favorite dream wizards grants you the ability to grab two shots aimed at you out of thin air and cause the force of both to decapitate a guard with such severity that his arm may well be a sports ball. The power of bullets in this universe depends on murderous intent. This sequence follows one where you drop a box of equipment on your target's head, Looney Tunes style, and that follows the brief exchange you have with Ryan's good friend while he's taking a shit so fat that he's practically glued to the toilet in front of him. Meanwhile, over the course of forty-eight hours in the background, seventy-eight people end up dying to "crime"—just "crime", nothing specific. You cannot seriously tell me this was supposed to be a moody, imposing, surreal piece of psychological horror. You have to be pranking me with those iceberg charts, right? I don't believe you.

The most successful aspect of Dreamweb is its music. I wish the prose and dialog in this got as much out of me as its music did. The music can get pretty repetitive and grating, too, but the soft, echo-y electronic sounds on songs with titles such as Like Killing Hitler imbue scenes with a sense of place that the miniatures this game calls home simply can't. Part of that is because Ryan over here takes up nearly a quarter of the screen, and the only reason he's there is so you can access your inventory. The sheer scale dwarfs everything else, robbing locations of the impact that they should have in favor of forcing a sense of presence that isn't really earned. This extends to different menus, as well as kill scenes. About the only time Ryan isn't taking up screen estate that could have been better used as at the very end when he's getting peppered with hot lead.

Outside of cute rain effects, the most atmospheric Dreamweb allows itself to get is through the singular, static background image on the screen you use to travel. That one image does a better job than anything else at conveying the city you're in, and it wears off after about a minute or two. I'm not going to be pretentious and say that Dreamweb is better listened to than played, but there really isn't a whole lot on offer here.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: what Hitman and its subsequent sequels proved is that this kind of game is always going to be sloppy or uneven when the developers refuse to relinquish control, and even that series had its growing pains. These games are pretty difficult to pull off with flying colors, and I don't believe Dreamweb passes the mark. The world is unconvincing, the characters are just mouthpieces, and only a couple of its many kill scenes involve something more creative than just shooting at your target. There's also this little booklet that comes with the game called "Diary of a Madman" because, apparently, the nineties gaming industry was occasionally allergic to being subtle. I haven't read that. I would assume that it fleshes out the main character somewhat, but if it's not contained within the game, it hardly counts for discussion here. Is it worth playing through this or spending ninety minutes on somebody else doing the same to see Dreamweb's gory death scenes in action? Not really.

I'm a sucker for cyberpunk settings, but bleh on this one.