I do like a nice silly point and click adventure game. Especially with regional British accents. And, hopefully, toilets. WELL WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT, Lucy Dreaming has all those things. Phew, eh?
Lucy suffers from nightmares and sets out to get to the root of why, with it seemingly having something to do with a murder in her town many years ago. Lucy can explore her house, and the town, in the usual pointy-clicky way you would with other games in the genre, but there’s a slightly mind-bending addition – you can also explore her dreams.
Depending on which items are arranged next to her bed when she goes to sleep, she enters one of a number of dreams. She can’t take items into or out of her dreams, but can influence how they play out with external stimuli, and can take items from one dream to another. Things Lucy discovers in her dreams affect her recollection of events in the waking world, and vice-versa, so it has similarities to other adventure games with parallel universes or time travel, only in a way I’ve not seen before.
Puzzles, albeit with the added dream complications, are mostly work-out-able with common sense and a bit of warped thinking, rather than be of the use-everything-on-everything-else format that I really don’t like. There are lots of silly characters to meet, and great accents (if a few perhaps less than stellar voice actors), as well as some very British references and stereotypes and lots of funny made up brand names.
Lucy Dreaming is definitely worth getting if you like these sorts of games, northern accents, and/or toilets. In fact, there are even puzzles involving the toilets. Look, if you are making a game and you want me to both play it and recommend it to others, just put some functional toilets in it and you’re a shoe-in.
