Freebie: ‘Inner Dream: Night One’

Sometimes You return once again with Inner Dream: Night One which is a prologue for their next game, proving to be interesting in concept and narrative, though a bit confusing.

Coming in as the equivalent of a quarter of the full game, Inner Dream: Night One aims to give players a taster of Sometimes You’s dreamy, surreal take on a modern day fairy tale. We last mentioned the developer upon reviewing Retention and the pros and cons mentioned in that review are nearly parallel to what we have to say about Inner Dream: Night One.

Once again, the use of photos by Sometimes You is very impressive in this latest effort from them. From forests, to seas and city landscapes, there are some really striking images for the player to gaze upon as well as explore as they make up the game’s environment. The fact that your mouse movement causes the screen to tilt adds to the effect greatly. Accompanying the photos are drawings which are similarly engaging in their depiction of a boys journey, which ended up being the more interesting story despite being a sub-plot.

So what is the story of Inner Dream: Night One? Unfortunately, that ends up being harder to answer than it should be. In essence it is simple, the developers surmise it as such:

“‘Inner Dream’ is a modern fairy tale about dreams. What if time frozen when you were sleeping? How could you wake up if everything around you now looks like a photo? Find your way in the world of dreams and make clock ticking again to find your way back to reality.”

That is more or less the gist of the game and seems easy enough to understand. However, the game itself uses Russian voice overs which are supported with English subtitles. Said subtitles attempt to capture the poetry of the original script but sometimes get tangled up, plus, you’ll find the odd translation error just to confuse matters a little more. At times it becomes the kind of experience in which you’re reading through the text and then realize you have no idea what you just read so you need to backtrack, but it’s too late. The game seems to have a lot of lofty ideas and genuinely seems to be an interesting narrative, but is flawed by its inaccessibility. Saying that, the game is based inside a dream of some sort so maybe that’s, in some weird way, a good thing?

Luckily, you get a sense of the eerie from the many characters along your travels through their photographed depictions featuring some brilliant costumes. Interaction in the dialogue with these characters is done by selecting a question with the arrow keys and works just fine, in fact the whole game works fine mechanically. At times you’ll have to point and click through environments (read: photos) and find items – mostly the drawings mentioned earlier – these parts work fine though you could easily get lost at times. Again, though, this seems to fit with the game’s surreal outset – do we ever know where we are in dreams and do we understand what is going on?

There’s still room for improvement in Inner Dream: Night One, mainly in the translation, but the rest of the game is an odd but pleasant experience. There’s a great soundtrack that really blends well with the game, provided by Keratordash which you can actually download for free right here.

You can download Inner Dream: Night One for PC over on Desura.

More information on Inner Dream is available on the game’s official Desura page.