Signos

Random Thought: "Represent ALL the mythologies!"

Dream sequence games are incredibly difficult to play, because there's so rarely any consistent logic or rational trail of thought. And the lack of consistency makes sense when you're actually in a dreamstate, but when you're awake playing a simulation of a dreamstate, they're too often just confusing or annoying. I felt that this game did a great job of actually bypassing a lot of that difficulty, by having some consistency and creating expectations for what you as a player needed to do to advance. The game-advancing mechanics were definitely confusing when I was first thrown into them, but after awhile I understood what I needed to do, and I appreciated the consistent direction. That said, I felt that while the puzzles tended to be logically consistent, they weren't necessarily thematically consistent. Sometimes the solution was to be a jerk, sometimes it was to find inner peace. And those two things seemed entirely at odds that I sometimes felt like I was making the wrong move and putting myself in an unwinnable place.

It was also kind of glaring that the writing could have been shored up: having mistakes in the names of your rooms is a pretty big offense. Not to mention that many synonyms just didn't exist (e.g. the "stone" was never recognized if you referred to it as "flint") and many objects just weren't there. This limitation was helped greatly by the interface highlighting important nouns, which helped prevent you from paying attention to the nonexistent nouns behind the curtains.

The ending was kind of confusing, I'm not exactly sure how I reached my inner peace and became one with the universe, but I won't argue with it. It was still kinda fun.

5/10