I recieved this game many years ago as part of some bundle for RPG Maker, and I decided to play it because I was looking for something straightforward with a more lighthearted theme. I am currently in the final dungeon of the game, but I feel like I've seen enough to be able to write this review now. Light story spoilers tagged.
Minor (?) update: I just finished the game. Of course I hit too many healing orbs while trying to dodge enemy encounters, so reminder to save often if you are aiming for that achievement. The final dungeon [spoiler]attempts to redeem the antagonist in an incredibly dark way, like I know content warnings were not super big in 2014 but yikes dude[/spoiler]. The penultimate boss spams spells that target the whole party and just sucks. Final boss is actually not that bad because [spoiler]he has access to every spell, which means a higher likelihood he'll pick a weaker one[/spoiler]. Also a tip, the second phase becomes easier if you just leave alone [spoiler]the green minions that cast Blind since that is the least obtrusive status and just focus on the others and the boss himself[/spoiler]. Finally, the ending of the game [spoiler]feels like a bad ending? It seems incredibly rushed too and doesn't make any sense at all. I'm so confused, and it doesn't seem like New Game+ will actually resolve the story in a good way[/spoiler].
If I had to describe this game with one word, it would be "ambitious". It's very cool for anyone to develop their own game and realize the vision of the story in their head. However, ambition alone is not necessarily a good thing.
Many of the dungeons include some sort of puzzle to solve. The very first dungeon, the Hypercubex, is one of the worst. It is totally unclear how to solve the hypercube puzzle, so I ended up just randomly moving things around until I stumbled on the correct path. And then the swamp has the incredibly tedious frogs puzzle that you just need to brute force. The pyramid has the insanely difficult sliding tile puzzle with no easy heuristic. The best puzzle in my opinion was [spoiler]Dr. Jekyll[/spoiler] 's pipe maze; the difficulty scaling was structured very well for a minigame, although it went on waaaay too long. No puzzles are ever revisited either, so as soon as you start to figure out a puzzle, you'll never see it again.
At least these puzzles are each partially optional if not going for a completionist playthrough... but then there's [spoiler]Dracula[/spoiler] 's castle and its god awful dungeon maze. No maps, no directions, no clues, and also there is a potential to softlock the game and trap yourself in the maze (so be sure to save often in this game). But the maze on its own wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the dungeon is absolutely littered with constantly respawning enemy encounters.
The combat system is consistently irritating. Here's just a litany of things I have experienced. It's cool to be able to teach any spell to any character, but spells are incredibly costly to use, are generally not that much stronger than physical attacks, and frequently are evaded. Heal spells, other than the one late game spell for full party healing, are basically useless even on your magic based characters and are outclassed by items pretty much instantly. There is no passive healing in the game, nor are there any ways to heal your magic other than using items or leveling up. One of your party members, Lily, has her basic attacks locked to a certain element at any given time, and because the elemental affinity of any enemy is totally unclear, especially with no in game bestiary, this means her attacks might randomly be nullified or even heal enemies with no way to change your element in the middle of the dungeon, and no way to change it [b]at all[/b] until you've reached at least the fourth dungeon.
As soon as the second dungeon in the game, enemies can inflict permanent poison, making HP management even more frustrating. Leveling up increases stats very slowly, so the difficulty of random encounters tends to outpace your party's growth. You will basically never be able to one-shot enemies. Enemies are symbol encounters that chase far more quickly than your movement speed, so avoiding encounters is near impossible. And fleeing from encounters is not always an option because the symbol will just respawn right in your path in the narrow hallway you likely found them.
Around 25% of my way through the game, I started spamming Freeze on every enemy who could inflict poison, which of course only sometimes worked. And around 75% through, I just started fleeing from nearly every encounter and not really bothering with leveling up anymore, because I found myself saying "I just want this game to be over." I realize I'm talking about the combat a lot, but it is an RPG. Combat should be the biggest thing.
The story is well written, but honestly I don't really care for most of the party. Faith and Curly basically take turns seeing who can be the biggest jerk throughout most of the story, and Lily's story doesn't seem to matter at all in this game named after her. Common wisdom for any story with a child protagonist would expect to make the story about them, but this game makes it clear that Faith is the main character, not Lily. Muggles is cool though.
I'm sorry, I really wanted to like this game. I thought what it attempted to do was a great idea with poor execution. But the prospect of not only needing to finish the final dungeon in this currently playthrough, but then needing to play [b]a second time[/b] for the remaining achievements is honestly dreadful. If I could carry forward my stats to a new game+, then maybe I could power through it, but unfortunately I don't think that is the case.
Regretfully, I give [i]Sweet Lily Dreams[/i] a 3/10. I just cannot recommend playing this game at all.
