The Dream Machine: Chapter 3 Review (Steppewalker)
Victor, is that you?
The Dream Machine Chapter 3 finds you, Victor Neff, inside another person's dream.
This is probably the chapter that will decide whether you dislike or like (or hate or love) the game going forwards, as it has probably the most esoteric and "video-gamey" puzzles of the entire game. The setting of the chapter (a boat that seems to be stranded in the middle of a large city) is a marvelous idea, and the hierarchical system aboard the ship is a great source of conflict for the characters present in the chapter. Determining whether or not the puzzles are any good is up for debate. Personally I found the puzzles here to be of mixed quality. The puzzles I did enjoy were fantastic, but there were a few puzzles that required some serious trial and error. Perhaps that was just my futile attempts at bashing my head against a brick wall when there was a perfectly obvious door just to the side of me.
This chapter contains elements of genuine horror and morbidity. My first playthrough was traumatic to some degree. The turn the game takes is fantastically horrifying, and yet done with a certain amount of tact. It's not cheap horror that The Dream Machine dwells in, that's for sure. It's haunting in a way that you wouldn't expect from a point and click adventure game.
What The Dream Machine does well is make lucid a certain feeling regarding dreams. It carries dream logic in a fairly seamless and interesting way, and it is in this chapter that Cockroach Inc. begin to explore the idea of a mind beneath the mind; the concept of the subconscious becomes more and more powerful as the game progresses.
Were I to score this out of ten, I would bestow upon this chapter an eight. Were you to allow me the specificity of a decimal system, an 8.5. A slight dip in puzzle quality is mostly offset by some fantastic writing and the horror on display. This is, speaking from a puzzle design perspective, the weakest chapter in the game, but is fantastic across the board in other areas. Well worth pushing through to see the rest of the game; it is the hurdle one must pass to reach the gold medal.