Dreamland R Final Mix

I've played two other German RPG Horror games in the past, Desert Nightmare and Schuld. In my opinion, this game blows them both out of the water.

From the very beginning, Dreamland establishes an amazing atmosphere that instantly makes the player feel helpless, which seems to be the central theme of the game: helplessness in the face of danger.

The game's ability to keep the player interested while also providing top notch scares was what really sold it for me. Every time I would take over a new character, I was intensely excited to find out what evils the character had committed and learn why they had been brought to this nightmarish environment. At the same time, I was curious as to what punishments the hellish town had in store for each person and how I was going to avoid them, which leads to the best aspect of Dreamland.

It gives the player hope. You stick with these characters, some not too evil and some on par with Ted Bundy, through zombies, vicious dogs, and horrifying demons. You fight tooth and nail through all of the puzzles and fight sequences, and the game consistently makes the player believe their character has a chance of survival. But, in reality, there is no chance, and that is the beauty of the game. True horror comes from being made to believe everything is going to be fine and then ripping away the small glimmer of hope; for nothing is more terrifying than being forced into a corner after you've tried so hard to survive.

The battle system was also well done. The object of the game seems to be to avoid fighting as much as possible, but when the player is forced to fight, it is not terribly difficult to win. The controls are smooth, and the game makes sure to provide you with plenty of ammo. Some might say that providing too much ammo makes the game easier, but it does not in this instance. The monsters are still exceedingly strong, and the player is consistently put into situations where there are many monsters in a small space, which makes a gun much less useful.

I also appreciated the game allowing the player to stock up on healing items. At the beginning, I thought the game was babying me by giving me so many healing items, but when I reached the end of the game I realized why. It is so easy to get hurt and so easy to die at the end of the game that the excess healing items were an absolute must.

The only real complaints I have about the game are the text (in the English version) and the vagueness of some of the puzzles. I faced the same text issue while playing Desert Nightmare. The text is hard to read. Lower case Ts look like lowercase Ls, lower case Ss look like lower case Gs, and 6s look like 8s. It didn't really take away from the game except for when I needed to solve a puzzle that involved numbers. Because the 6s looked like 8s I spent about 10 minutes stuck on one puzzle.

Two puzzles stood out to me as rather vague. There was a puzzle that involved a four-way room. You had to enter the four doorways in a certain order if you wanted to proceed. No big deal, except the game was vague in its directions. There were 6 directions written on the paper and three blank spaces. Figuring out the three blank directions was easy, however, I assumed that you were supposed to walk in all 9 directions in order to proceed, not only the last 3, and the game never explains that you're only supposed to walk in the last 3 directions. Frustrating, but not that big of a deal.

The second puzzle involved the train with the word ISLES written on the floor. The letters L and E were bold, which indicated 37. This seems like a pretty easy puzzle except there is no indication that the L and E are upside down numbers. All that is provided is the word ISLES. I wound up having to look up a guide for this puzzle due to its vagueness.

However, the two vague puzzles and the wonky font do not take anything away from the game. The rest of the puzzles are reasonably challenging, the scares are well delivered, and the story is highly interesting. I gave the game a 4.5 simply due to those small issues, but this is definitely a game I would recommend to anyone who is a fan of survival horror. I'm going to be keeping my eye on you, Judeau, just in case you make any more games.