The Sueño (quoth the game: it's Spanish for dream) is a parser adventure in the mystery/thriller/Inception genres in which you play a broke uni student who hits up a sleep study for some cash, gets into lucid dreaming and finds disturbing stuff in there.
The game's slowish start feels necessary in retrospect in that it establishes a game environment in which the PC is able to bring some subtle dreaming tricks to bear on puzzles. Interest and mystery increase significantly in the game's latter half set in a deserted town, but the end text felt disappointingly rushed to me. There's a fair bit of low level tech/grammar polish wanting throughout, but by the same token MTW again demonstrates that it can be OK to let Inform's default messages blot up a lot of obligatory crap that most players won't be deeply interested in. I'm too anal retentive as an IF author to try to live out this idea, but I'd say it's one of the reasons MTW's been able to produce at least 13 parser-powered IF games in just a few years. He's been in almost every kind of IF comp that's going (Ectocomp, IFComp, Introcomp, Shufflecomp, Spring Thing) plus he's got a series featuring a coarse, nameless hardboiled detective, which kicks off with The Surprising Case of Brian Timmons.
The Sueño's oneiric game mechanics feel open-ended enough that if anything, I think the whole could benefit from going bigger to exploit more of their possibilities, at which point it might get too big for IFComp. But one knows what is commonly said to one: Better to leave 'em wanting more than less. I certainly recommend this game to parser mystery/thriller/Inception interestees.
It took me about 80 minutes to complete The Sueño. I used the nifty and diegetic (meaning 'present in the game's reality') hint device a fair bit, and I turned to the non-diegetic walkthrough file about 2-3 times.
For extended reviewage with full spoilers you can
The opening scenes of The Sueño feel a bit perfunctory. I understand the game needs to set up the story about the PC taking part in the sleep clinic trial, and so doing it literally with a nurse and doctor and changing your clothes and getting into bed is one way to go, but the prose here didn't throw much remarkability to hook me into what was going on, or interest me in the PC. It's typical 'list the exits and cover the minimum props' stuff. The PC is a 19 year-old guy who sports a far less surly version of a voice I recognise from past MTW games. And there was the tedium of having to remove my clothes one at a time ('remove clothes' wasn't implemented) and put on the hospital gown. So I didn't start out on-side.
The semi-deserted house of the dream is sparse and, again, typical-feeling. Having such an apparently ordinary first location makes more sense after you begin to learn that you can DREAM about stuff with varying results, including but not limited to eliminating hazards, restoring situations, teleporting about or manipulating other characters. The point of interest in this game is that the specifics of what DREAM will do, or when or how you should use it, are never given. That leaves it up to you to wield some intuition, and makes it satisfying when you discover a new trick. This is the sense in which I think the game could have gone on longer – by the time DREAM is really warming up and showing a lot of range, The Sueño is over.
The ordinariness of the first house also means the game starts out feeling very open. You don't know where it will go, for good or bad, or whether there'll be goals or villains or just open-range dreaming. It turns out there is a villain of the piece, the sleep doctor, and it's interesting that you only perceive his villainy in the subconscious realm. In the real world, he never really says or does anything negative in front of you. The Sueño develops a good sense of menace with some of the macabre images encountered in the deserted town, and with the eventual presence of the zombie-like Wallace Josephs following you around. That said, the puzzle involving getting an object off Josephs is one you're only likely to solve by luck in choice of weaponry, so that was the first occasion upon which I turned to the walkthrough file.
The revelation of Josephs's mafia-dom is a decent way to develop or end this thriller, but the game really rushed to the latter. I found the closing text to be pretty vague and a disappointing reward for my efforts. Just rewriting that alone would be a start, but maybe even having some kind of denouement encounter back in the real world would be better.
Overall, I suspect that The Sueño was assembled a bit too hastily. There are minor bugs, omissions, some rough dialogue formatting and there's that abrupt outro. But the central business of exploring a mystery in a spooky, slightly off world is properly engaging. The DREAM mechanic is a good one and plays strongly to the main magic of parser games, that feeling you get when you're able to pull an idea completely out of thin air and find that it works.
At one point, having started to look at parts of the walkthrough, I feared that I'd wrecked my game because I had chased Walter Josephs out of the dream world before getting that aforementioned important item off him. It occurred to me to try dreaming about him. He reappeared. That was very cool.
Thanks for the review, Wade!
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