I went into this like "ok time to do all 365 days!", but after 6 or so hours and ~75 days (plus another 20 I had to play through again because the game hung? So ~95) I feel like to keep going over and over would just ruin the experience. I was starting to tire of it! And what a shame that would be.
It's not a "game" like that; you don't really "complete it", maybe eventually you get to a full year, but I don't think that's the point. It's like a nice bonus if you come back for a whole year of emulated dreams. The ending on day 365 goes through the traditional symbols of a Hatsuyume. That is to say, it's a dream journal. Your dream journal.
It was really fun after the fact to go and see how the procedural generation worked, but in the process of playing through it I found it really easy to just want to sit and look at the scenery. I ended up taking a lot of photos. A single batch of those is here.
I think it's a cool vibey piece of digital art. It's something you can come back to and revisit. It's something I could pull up for an hour or two with friends if I was entertaining and let the ambiance play with people. If you let the menu sit for 10 seconds a video starts anyway — it wants to keep the scenery going, to set and maintain its tone.
Finally I want to point out just how unobtuse it is. The game doesn't want you to get stuck. It doesn't want to be a puzzle. It puts the atmosphere and mystique first and foremost and designed the entire game around the surreal traversal of the dream world. So you can't "lose", you can't have an obstacle in your way; it's all just ways of moving to another image, another set of symbols. Within its constraints over time the maps felt repetitive but the textures didn't. I felt like I would occasionally be given an exceptionally rare symbol in a sea of patterns.
I feel like in a sense it got a lot of mystique in the late 2000s/early 2010s when I was young, and it felt overrated for a moment? But I don't think it's scary or creepy. I think it's cool. Neat. Etc. It runs at like 12 fps at best too but don't think too hard about that.
It's not a "game" like that; you don't really "complete it", maybe eventually you get to a full year, but I don't think that's the point. It's like a nice bonus if you come back for a whole year of emulated dreams. The ending on day 365 goes through the traditional symbols of a Hatsuyume. That is to say, it's a dream journal. Your dream journal.
It was really fun after the fact to go and see how the procedural generation worked, but in the process of playing through it I found it really easy to just want to sit and look at the scenery. I ended up taking a lot of photos. A single batch of those is here.
I think it's a cool vibey piece of digital art. It's something you can come back to and revisit. It's something I could pull up for an hour or two with friends if I was entertaining and let the ambiance play with people. If you let the menu sit for 10 seconds a video starts anyway — it wants to keep the scenery going, to set and maintain its tone.
Finally I want to point out just how unobtuse it is. The game doesn't want you to get stuck. It doesn't want to be a puzzle. It puts the atmosphere and mystique first and foremost and designed the entire game around the surreal traversal of the dream world. So you can't "lose", you can't have an obstacle in your way; it's all just ways of moving to another image, another set of symbols. Within its constraints over time the maps felt repetitive but the textures didn't. I felt like I would occasionally be given an exceptionally rare symbol in a sea of patterns.
I feel like in a sense it got a lot of mystique in the late 2000s/early 2010s when I was young, and it felt overrated for a moment? But I don't think it's scary or creepy. I think it's cool. Neat. Etc. It runs at like 12 fps at best too but don't think too hard about that.