In an alternate future where the Soviet Union has remained in tact, an oppressive government has taken a stranglehold on the population. A resistance forms, and a plan is made to assassinate the leader of this evil regime. But who can the resistance turn to? Who has the best shot at completing such a dangerous and treasonous mission. Well inexplicably in the recently released DreamBreak, humanity’s best hope is a dive bar janitor named Eugene.
DreamBreak is a point and click adventure title from the folks over at Aist. The game follows Eugene, an un-remarkable janitor who is actually…oh no wait, that’s really all he is, just a janitor. If you’re wondering why a resistance would choose a janitor to kill an evil dictator join the club. DreamBreak attempts to tell a very complex story with as little effort as possible. Its dialogue is shared in short, poorly translated bursts, complete with a font that’s kerned so poorly you frequently can’t tell what characters are saying anyway.
The game is billed as a point and click adventure but part of its schtick is that it blends that genre with a number of small action segments. You’ll find Eugene getting into battles with the police, betting on virtual animal races, hacking into enemy drones while driving, and even “battling” gigantic mech bosses. Unfortunately in an attempt to mash together as many gameplay types as possible we never get anything that feels wholly satisfying.
What we have here is a lot of neat ideas jumbled together in a pot that can’t ever seem to cook any of them all the way through. The game’s weakest element is surely its point and click adventure aspects. I never thought I’d live to see the day where I complained about controls in a point and click adventure title but here we are. This game is a sluggish nightmare to control with the mouse. Objects can’t be examined unless you’re standing directly on them. Clicking on spots on the map will direct Eugene to walk there at an unbearably slow pace but if you accidentally click too high on a tile he’ll leap into the air for a jump. Eugene does everything sooooo slowly and it wasn’t uncommon for me to get impatient waiting for my movement and accidentally click myself right into a deadly obstacle.
Things got dramatically easier when I realized the game had keyboard controls. While some situations still called for a mouse I was generally able to navigate the world much easier without one. This isn’t without its drawbacks though, take combat for example: When a gunfight breaks out you can click in front of Eugene to fire your weapon, while clicking behind him will emit a force field that will block incoming fire. These segments feel somewhat balanced with the mouse but using your keyboard completely nullifies the difficulty. I didn’t die once in this game after switching over to a keyboard.
Puzzles in DreamBreak are incredibly simple and will require little to no thought. Items are displayed in your inventory but you’ll use them automatically when clicking on the appropriate objects in the world. The game is super linear and because of that you’ll typically only pick up one item in a zone and it will always be the item you need to solve the “puzzle”. For example at one point I got to a vehicle that I wanted to hijack but found that it was missing a storage battery. Well lucky me the battery was literally in a box directly under the vehicle. This is how almost all the game’s puzzles work, you’ll never have to apply any critical thinking when it comes to your inventory and the items you need to complete a puzzle are never more than a screen or two away.
There is one puzzle I enjoyed that pops up a few times and that’s the game’s knock off version of those water flow pipe games you always see on mobile, you know, the ones where you re-organize pipes to get a stream of water from one end of a stage to another without any leaks. It’s uninspired and not even executed as well as some Android titles, but nevertheless it’s a nice distraction from the incredibly poor adventure elements.
While the action segments are better, they’re definitely not perfect. At one point in my journey Eugene wound up stealing a vehicle that fires missiles into the sky non-stop. A fortunate turn of events as the very next screen had a cavalcade of drones preying down upon me from above. As I fought them back my cell phone buzzed and I found myself annoyed upon noticing that when I paused the game it would just keep on playing in the background while the menu was up. Oh well, I resigned to take my phone call but found that when I returned I’d beaten all the drones anyway, without even touching the controls.
I wouldn’t call it a saving grace but I will say that terrible fonts aside the game looks and sounds pretty great. The detailed pixel art is perfectly reminiscent of older adventure games like Beneath A Steel Sky or Flashback. The latter of which seems to be the game’s most obvious visual inspiration. The music is not half bad either featuring more than one track that I liked. It’s a shame the quality of play just doesn’t match the aesthetics.
Eugene says this any time you use a lift in this segment. What’s curious is they all work. Although if you use the one pictured twice the game will freeze. Maybe that’s what he meant.
The game ends with an abritrary choice that nets you the “good” or “bad” ending, and then serves up a white “thank you” screen that you’ll have to alt-tab out of in order to close the program, a perfect final punctuation mark to the wholly under-cooked gaming experience. I can’t think of a circumstance where I would recommend this, even at its generously discounted price of $6.99, especially when you factor in that you can likely finish the whole thing just under the two hour mark. DreamBreak feels like a fun creative vision that just couldn’t be backed up by technical prowess. As it stands now this is one dream I looked forward to waking up from.
This review is based on retail PC code provided to us by the game’s publisher.
