Dreamland R Final Mix

I was drawn to play this game by the horror tag and high rating, but in my opinion the game doesn't deserve them. Gore is not the same as horror, and this game has too much of the former without enough of the latter for me. Combine that with slooooow gameplay, a few terribly-programmed chase sequences, and a mix of puzzles that are explained so slowly and clearly a baby could understand them with puzzles that were completely obscure to me (on easy mode), and there were too many things I disliked to really enjoy the things I liked.

Characters:
I hated them all, except for Brad. Everyone else is human garbage, fantastically evil in ways I can't imagine people acting in real life, without clear motivations or goals. Brad is thrown in with this lot for apparently the sin of not being able to die, and maybe something to do with a girl named Evelyn that's never actually explained. Unfortunately, getting anyone killed results in a game over instead of letting me continue with the remaining cast. Which is a shame, because given the chance I'd suicide with Seth and Carter as soon as I got control over them.

And some of the relationships between characters are completely unclear. Brad runs out on Evelyn when she's doing... something... that he understands but is never explained to the audience, and runs into Ruben, who he knows for reasons that are also never explained. By the end of the game, there are enough loose threads to make a throw rug. The game would have been much improved by tying those up.

And the last quarter of the game, where you hang with Ruben, makes absolutely no sense. Ruben comes in brandishing a gun and starts telling people what to do, even though the character I'm controlling is literally pointing a gun right back at him, and so is the other character with me. Why is this treated as though Ruben is the only one who can kill anyone else, when it should at least be treated like a standoff?

Regarding 2 of the monster characters who stand around philosophizing, I have to ask both: why did we have to see this, and what relevance did they have to the plot? I would have been happier to never see those characters at all, for all they mattered. As it was, they just added to what I felt were the wastes of time in the game.

Gameplay:
However, I wouldn't want to have those threads tied up if it meant another super-slow cutscene. Every single time I lost control of a character - which I think ended up being more time than when I had control of a character - I wanted to skip through text, or make the cutscenes otherwise faster. The highlight of this slow pacing is in the introduction, when the camera flies over the town as though showing off the beauty of the 16-bit graphics, which feels completely pointless to me.

Then I need to talk about the battle system. For full disclosure: I dislike battle systems in horror games, because I feel they detract from the scariness of a game. But I was willing to put up with some battle in the interest of playing a hopefully-otherwise-spooky game. I played on easy mode, because I was more interested in story and being scared than in facing a challenge. But the first battle required 16 shots to kill the enemy, and the enemy was just a mook. 16 is just too many! 4 is pushing too many for a mook, and 8 is enough for a boss. Subsequent battles took 16, 5, 9, or other numbers of bullets, with seemingly no connection between an enemy's importance to the plot and their HP total. The highlight of this was Alan's boss battle, where the boss only allowed me to hit him once for each minute of attacks he threw at me. And after failing the first time, I had to watch that long cutscene before the battle again, making me almost want to quit right there.

Then we have chase scenes/timed escapes. Brad's are all fine, except for the one where a broken bridge has 3 sets of boards right next to it, and the game spends 30 seconds highlighting them and the places on the bridge where they're supposed to go. I can't imagine that was necessary or playtested. At the opposite end of the difficulty spectrum is Rinoa's marsh chase scene. I can't count how many times I was mobbed to death, in part because she can't shoot anything during that scene, despite still having her gun. And the fact that enemies can move while I'm stuck in a mini-cutscene of text popping up and staying there for 5 seconds means that going to the door and picking up the key both caused me to get stuck behind a wall of enemies more than once. Then we have the section with fire and levers, which makes no sense, because the mob train of enemies that rush in if you take too long putting the key in the lock is so long, and the fire lasts for such a short time, that it's absolutely pointless to try to do anything besides put the key in the lock. That was frustrating.

Lastly we have exploration. As presumably was intended, I got lost in the town. I'm kinda ok with that, except that instead of being scary, it was just boring and frustrating, because there's nothing to do except to find the one quest item or door that will advance the plot, and absolutely no directions on how to find it. And the part of the game where Carter walks through the forest took entirely too long. Please, if you modify the game again, just remove all of the screens where all I do is walk through a long foresty lane. I'm ok with abstractly short paths in the name of conservation of detail. Having to walk through all of those was just more boring and frustrating.

On a side note: the game instructions say that many enemies drop items. That's a lie. I would consider that good, if a lot of the instructions were lies for the purpose of messing with the player, but they're usually not, so that just feels like bad game design.

Graphics/Music:
This being an RPGMaker game, I don't expect much in the way of graphics. That said, I thought RPGMaker had some pre-made sprites, or something you could use besides textures from other games. But the main character was Chrono, and the only girl character was Marle. I was at least surprised that the characters I knew got the ending they did, but familiarity is not good for scariness. Neither is boss battle music, which is made to give a scene an epic feel. One of the chase themes was the Ridley boss battle music (which does not lend itself to scares for that exact reason), and I noticed one or 2 sound effects from older games. Some of the music was great, but the reused boss battle music was not.

Bugs:
This game has bugs. In the embryo battle, I got stuck inside the big embryo circle with the 4 unkillable boss minions, and had to shoot the eyes with my gun in order to escape. (I forgot to mention I had no clue how to damage that boss, even after I won. That's another example of what I call a badly-designed battle.)

In one of the scenes where Ruben is ordering the group through the caves, I could control Brad, so I walked through the exit to get away from him. That hard-locked the game on a black screen, and I had to quit to restart. Then I had to watch the long cutscenes again...

Those were the 2 big ones, but they really detracted from the experience.

Overall:
There were good things about this game. Some of the atmosphere was spooky, and so were things like Brad standing against the wall in the alley while noises and shadows suggested something nasty after him. But (1) then he got a gun, so that no longer mattered, and (2) all of those cutscenes were too long and drawn out for me to like them. Similarly, some of the jumpscares were great. But having to fight a battle after a jumpscare really detracts from the scariness. I have to give this game a low rating.