Review of Bad Dream: Fever by Vegetable Party
Rating by Vegetable Party posted on Jan 13, 2023 | edit | delete
something that can't be cured
There are few tropes i hate as much as the meta-drama of developer woe. It seemed inherently cringey and oblivious; why interrupt the engagement and suspension of disbelief you managed to stir up in your audience to run a sympathy campaign for yourself?
Leave it to the author of the ingenious and horrifying Bad Dream: Coma to take this assignment and flip it: Instead of the developer’s lukewarm bath water, this is a torrent of interesting neurosis that make for good horror and adventure game logic.
Its predecessor threw you into the action, so to speak, and gave you the consequences later. The dream where anything bad is possible makes place for a more conventional point & click adventure game. And you have to click, a lot, before it returns the favour. Once it does, you’re in for a ride.
The puzzles range from pixel hunt to clever sequences that work on the level of the story. There’s an internal nightmare logic and the more you get it, the more the game gets meta with it. And it actually serves the plot!
Graphically, it’s quite well drawn, resembling pencil sketches of everyday life, interspersed with doodles and scratches, washed in moody sepia. Again: thematically consistent with the story and mechanics of the game. The world can fit on neatly on the map of one town and it’s surrounding area with enough variety in locations to bump around in.
Sound design is limited. Effective, though. This is not a slapping soundtrack type of experience. It’s appropriately subdued.
****, who appears in the game as a woman wearing a plague mask, is one of Bad Dream: Fever’s greatest strengths. She’s the first person you meet and she immediately sees your potential - a tool to explore the outside world and find a cure for this dang fever! She’s both one of the most interesting and consistent AG personalities and a painful dissection, something turned into someone, turned into an object - and back around.. it is horrific and really drives home a theme.
Other characters are more of the general puzzle adventure variety, which doesn’t equal bad - they work very well for the interactions you have with them. They’re pretty cool, or dead.
The environments are.. bleak. There’s destruction, decay, infestation and haunting death. Everything looks like a sketch of the world you might encounter right outside of your door, drawn and redrawn from memory on a notepad, from a place of near total alienation. It’s dark is what i’m saying.
The game’s weakest point: the very economical use the cursor in what’s essentially a visual novel with inventory puzzles. It’s sparse, for good and bad. And it might be difficult to tune into the semi-lucid wavelength of this game. Perhaps it takes the type of unconstrained cognition found after decades of meditation, lucking out on psychedelics, long term sleep deprivation, or having a particular kind of wiring in the brain.
Who knows? I just know i loved it, it challenged me and gave me all sorts of thoughts and feelings, pleasant and unpleasant, equally welcome and interesting. That’s some choice gaming experience right there.
Read the review »
Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Easy
