CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

If a game looks good, it looks good regardless of what graphics you're using. Ditto if it looks bad. Granted, your chance of making the game look good is affected by what graphics you're using, but in the end it boils down to how well it looks.

I think that what you need to look into, if you don't want to turn her into a Mary Sue, is how the world reacts to her. A female character being beautiful is not on it's own a sign of a Mary Sue, but everyone and their mother commenting on her beauty however, is. A female character being able to kick ass is not a problem, but NPCs going out of their way to accentuate her asskickery is not so good. In short, the world should not rearrange itself for the purpose of making her look as awesome as possible. This includes people being unreasonable harsh towards her so that she ends up looking extra strong when she overcomes her obstacles.

I had a game idea where you control some sort of medieval detective. That detective isn't very detectivish however and tend to think that fireball is the solution to problems. He or she still ends up solving the mystery.

Edit: Oops, didn't read the topic carefully enough.

Crap, the first point I made just got completely trashed by Everguard!

Anyone who plays the game will damn well know there's something odd about the dream world. The fact that multiple people have the same dream is a giveaway.

However, when you involve supernatural events like that, nothing prevents it from being both real and a dream at the same time. The characters could be dreaming it all while those events at the same time takes place at another dimension or something. Involving an unexplained supernatural event opens up practically every door. For that reason, you can't expect the player to link the lack of "dream effects" with the idea that maybe it isn't just a dream. Again, any player will know that there's more to it than just a dream.

If you want the player to know the dream effects were left out on purpose, I think you can more or less have the characters say that. Dreams in real life are often not only "foggy", but also incoherent. They can jump from one event to another in a way that were it a story, it would have looked like the author started writing one plot, then in the middle forget what plot he was writing and instead wrote a different plot. For example, I've had dream where I first was in one type of environment and later I was in a completely different environment without any clear reason to why I'm suddenly somewhere else. I didn't either notice anything was wrong until I woke up and then thought about the dream. The characters can discuss that fact and comment that the dream they all had was both way to clear and coherent.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's really any tricks to making the player ask questions though. The better the writing, the more curious the players will be. It's very simple really, whenever something doesn't make any sense based on the information you have, either you lack the information that will make sense of it or it is so that it just doesn't make any sense. If you want the player to trust you on that it's the former, you need to have shown them earlier that things does make sense. Basically, pay attention to the small details and write them so that the player knows you're thinking things trough.