Dream Chronicles

by Zoo Games

Product Features

• Be as curious as you want to be click on everything on your current screen to see what it is perhaps it will aid you in unlocking the next door
• Find objects and add them to you inventory for later use

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002GHHJQI
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 inches ; 4 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: March 9, 2010
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,796 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: Nintendo DS

Imagine waking up from a deep sleep to find your husband missing and your daughter and the entire town under a sleeping spell. Unsure of what to do, you begin to notice that your surroundings seem strangely surreal and other worldly…there are clues scattered throughout the town like breadcrumbs, apparently left by your missing husband. Put the clues together and overcome the obstacles in your path and you might discover what happened to your family and friends. If the clues are not all found, the sleeping spell may last forever and your husband may remain missing. Then again, what if it's all just a dream?

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Close to being very, very good. But..., March 23, 2010

By 

Dick Johnson (Oklahoma USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

= Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars 

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dream Chronicles (Video Game)

... close wins no awards. This should have been better; much better. There were a few horribly thought out levels and way too many invisible items to find (tap...tap...tap...repeat dozens of times - if it had only been just that frustrating). Details below.

The different levels in this game and its features run from 5 stars down to 1 star - and that's a real shame. At the start, I though this was going to be a winner. Puzzles should cause the player to have to think, but not be so difficult that they are more like work than fun. And by difficult, I'm not talking about solving the problems, but getting the items so you can work on solving the problems.

There are way, way too many places where the only way pieces of the puzzle could be found was by constant tapping until you hit something. The little glimmering "hint" feature is of little use. The biggest problem with finding things that were so well hidden is that you had to hit within a hair of the item. This meant having to saturate the area with taps - but just a hair to close to one another and the description screen would pop up that you then had to click again to get rid of. This was altogether very frustrating - again all in an attempt to find invisible items. Moving the small items around, as you are required to do many times, is equally as frustrating. You have to try multiple times to pick up the item you want to use and multiple times more to drop it where you want it.

The requirement to click within such a fine tolerance made some levels horrible to get through. That feature ruined the enjoyment of what should have been fun puzzles.

The graphics are very good, the music is better than average, the overall game design is fun to play. The details are just too frustrating and uneven. This was so close to being a 5 star game. The poor features are so annoying, though, that the entire game gets dragged down.

For anyone without a music background: Minor spoiler alert! Level 9 - the Piano Room. There are a couple of puzzles here and a whole world of frustration. First there is a lot of blind tapping to find a few of the items. Then, and this is a 1 star feature of this game, if you do not have an ear for music - quit right here. You have to listen to tunes, convert them to notes, memorize them, and go to a piano to play the notes - 7 times! EDIT 3/31/10 I have been told that in Level 9, you can turn the crank and watch to learn tune to enter. End of 3/31/10 edit. I am not musically inclined. I personally think there should be a kazoo section in a symphony orchestra (where's Spike Jones when we need him?). It was only by use of the faq by CasaNova73099 I found on gamefaqs that I was able go get through this level. End of spoiler.

That level 9 fiasco would have caused me to return the game had someone not posted some help (which should not be required for a game of this level of play!). Level 16 is also ruined by the invisible item problem. It has some of the best puzzles in the game, but the frustration of finding dark pieces in the dark is something that removed the enjoyment. Such design features are a sign of lazy design not cleverness of puzzle construction.

Before you work on a new game, Zoo, you should fix this one. The caveat in your manual that items may be small and hard to find does not equate with so small that you can only find them by constant tapping. Do you not have gamers from your target market test these before you release them? If not, why not?

Overall: There is a fun game in here, marred by releasing it without really testing it for playability.

Get it: if you don't mind tapping your way through level after level - and multi-tapping when there should be no need due to the stylus controls being so fine tuned as to be hard to use for small items.

Get it: if you have no problems with music or don't mind having to use someone else's notes to get through a level or two.

Don't get it: if you want a relaxing puzzle game that relies on brain work more than luck at finding stuff. There are some very fun puzzles, but not nearly as fun as they should have been.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good game but........, April 14, 2010

By 

Jennifer H "jennifer19" (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Dream Chronicles (Video Game)

I really enjoyed Dream Chronicles. The music and graphics are really nice. The reason that I only gave it four stars is that there is so much random tapping in order to find things! The small DS screen makes it difficult to see what you are looking for at times. The other VERY frustrating thing that I found is when the items are in your inventory the taps are sometimes totally unresponsive, so you may have to tap several times just to pick an item up. I won't spoil it, but I was very disappointed in the end of the game. I was also disappointed to realize that if you didn't find ALL of the dream pieces by the end of the game there was no way to go back and collect them. Other than these few things I thought the game was very good and I would recommend it to anyone that enjoys seek and find and puzzle type games.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Good game, but..., June 30, 2010

By 

Gameboy "David" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Dream Chronicles (Video Game)

This game was really fun to play and I thoroughly enjoyed it...until the ending. The ending happened so fast I almost missed it. It went by so fast I can't tell you what happened. It's almost like no ending at all. If you must buy this game, get it for the gameplay and not the ending.

I had no trouble finding anything in the game and was able to find all the little pieces of the puzzle so to speak.

The graphics were really good, but there was almost no music to speak of.

It's a quiet relaxing game that will take you roughly 5 hours to complete.

Because of the extremely short length of the game and the almost non-existent ending, I cannot recommend this game. I expected more than 5 hours of gameplay for the money I spent on this.

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