Esoterica: The Dreamlike

Name: Esoterica

Developer: Sbester

Story: Traumatized, Danny has a created a dream world for himself where he can be the man he's always wanted to be. The problem is, the characters in his dream are taking it over. This is the first, very short game in what is being called a trilogy.



Writing: The game's story opens with a minor amount of psychiatric pseudo-jargon, delivered by Obi-Wan Kenobi. That's followed up almost immediately by a scene of police action with the typical cop lingo being thrown back and forth. There's really not a lot to say here. The effort has all gone into making the game and the story interesting, and the developer entirely succeeds.

Gameplay: I feel like the gameplay is a bit threadbare. There is a drifting target on the screen and if you're in it, you die instantly. You have to either line up with your opponent and shoot him, or you have to get next to him and use melee attack. Once you leave the first action sequence, you never get the melee option again, and this leads to a bit of a misunderstanding because it took me a bit to realize that I just couldn't use melee anymore. I found it to be a somewhat awkward, but functional system.



Graphics: The graphics are variable in this game. None of the styles really seem to match at any point. You can see the different facechip styles here. The same inconsistencies exist in the tiles, also. You can also see in the above screenshots that the character sprites also don't seem to match each other.



Sound: The BGMs are all very police drama appropriate with a very strong 8-bit sound. The sound of the game is really very nostalgic. The sound effects are put to great use.



Glitches: Veronica's facechip has transparency issues. The main character is consistently visible during screen changes when he's not supposed to be. The bartender walks into the wall. Visual issues plague the game throughout.

Conclusion: It's not a bad little thing. The combat system is a bit awkward, as previously noted, but the game is short with an interesting story and asks interesting questions.