Lucy Dreaming

One of the best point&clicks I've played in recent years. It's a hilarious and dark game making fun of British everyyday life, with weird dreams, strange characters and a murder mystery to unravel. The puzzles are clever and some of them rather a challenge - which is very welcome! The beginning might seem a tad tedious to some, but give it a chance, it's really a great game and I had so much fun with it!

There's been a lot of discourse in the adventure game community the last couple of years about how modern point and clicks have become too streamlined: too few and easy puzzles, with an over-reliance on story over gameplay. Therefore it's interesting playing Lucy Dreaming, a modern P&C that is streamlined in a lot of ways, but keeps itself [i]unashamedly[/i] in the old school, for better and worse... First of all, the game looks and sounds great: the early LucasArts influence is palpable, with chunky, Maniac Mansion-esque pixel art, memorable tunes and an impressive voice cast. The comedy writing is surprisingly good as well, with some genuinely funny moments, even though it does commit to the "let's reference every single other classic adventure game all the time"-style of writing that I personally am very tired of by now. Nostalgic references are not a replacement for good writing. You [i]are[/i] allowed to write a comedy adventure game without mentioning Guybrush Threepwood at every turn. However, the main thing that keeps LD in the old school is the puzzles. The game has a really interesting gameplay concept where you have to interact with your dreams to progress the main story, and vice versa: to progress in your dreams, you often must find things the real world to help your dreams along. It's a cool little concept that feels fresh without actually changing much of the classic inventory puzzling formula. However: The puzzles are HARD. Sometimes frustratingly so. As someone who's been playing adventure games since the late 90's, I'm no stranger to obscure puzzles, but alot of the solutions in LD feels down right obtuse. It was a long time since I had to look up this many solutions online to progress, and a lot of the times the reaction to reading them is less "Of course, I should have known that" and more "How the hell should I have known that?". I'm in two minds about Lucy Dreaming: it's a charming, enjoyable and well-produced retro comedy mystery game, but in it's old school ambition, it also retains some of the genres worst traits of yesteryear. I would recommend it, but only to the die-hard fans of the genre.