The game is set in a future where technology has advanced enough to create entire worlds from people’s dreams. Not only can these dream worlds be brought to life, but they can be shaped and altered at will, designed to fulfill any desire and even become places where someone could spend an entire lifetime. This breakthrough has led to a global competition open to everyone. The participant who creates a world that benefits the real world in some meaningful way becomes the winner, and their dream world becomes the only one others are allowed to enter.
You play as Clemens, the authority in charge of concluding the latest cycle of this competition. Normally, your boss would handle this task, but they are currently absent after experiencing strange dreams and unsettling anomalies during visits to these virtual worlds. When you press the button to end the cycle, however, something unexpected occurs.
Although the game falls into the walking simulator genre, which is often associated with restrictive mechanics or slow pacing, this title includes several quality-of-life features that make the experience more enjoyable. Movement speed is usually one of the biggest complaints in such games, but here you have the option to enable infinite running so your character never gets tired. You can also increase both walking and running speeds, which makes exploration far more pleasant.
The opening minutes unfold in a mostly linear city environment built from large, open areas. From the very beginning, the game encourages players to explore and learn as much as possible about the world. Some information is discovered simply by wandering around, but most of the lore comes from notes scattered throughout the environment. It is highly recommended to turn on the item highlight feature; without it, spotting important items in the detailed world can become quite difficult.
All discovered information is automatically recorded in the Mindmap, a large branching structure that resembles a skill tree from a role-playing game. By selecting nodes and unlocking new pieces of information, you gradually learn about the city, its rules, its inhabitants, and the broader society. The upper portion of the Mindmap focuses on the city, while the lower portion is dedicated to the Valley of the Mists, which serves as the game’s main, fully open exploration area.
The valley itself is a spacious circular region with a lake at its center and mountains forming natural boundaries along the outer edges. You can follow roads and signposts that guide movement, or simply choose a direction and begin exploring freely. The terrain is not flat; it includes various elevations and cliffs that require attention. Your character can jump, and there are no invisible walls preventing missteps, so it is entirely possible to walk off a ledge. Fortunately, death is not a mechanic in this game, and you respawn immediately near a safe spot whenever you fall.
The hotel stands as the valley’s central landmark, containing multiple rooms previously occupied by different individuals from various timelines. While only a handful of characters truly matter to the story, the hotel still provides depth by allowing you to peek into the history of its residents. Many rooms are locked, but keys can be found scattered around the valley, especially inside small cloudy domes you encounter while exploring.
The level of detail within the hotel is surprisingly high. Besides key items, there are numerous miscellaneous objects that you can examine by hovering the cursor over them. Some objects can be picked up and inspected more closely. Although these interactions do not affect gameplay directly, they add atmosphere and substance. Other locations around the valley, such as statues or small structures, serve more as landmarks and do not offer the same level of environmental storytelling.
Every important location discovered in the valley is added to your map, making fast travel instantly available. Wells scattered throughout the area allow for short-range teleportation between specific points, while small statues found during exploration transport you to the larger statues standing in key areas. As you explore, you occasionally receive news updates about what has been happening in the city in your absence.
The main appeal of the game lies in exploration, reading notes, and immersing yourself in the world’s quiet atmosphere. However, if you aim to reach one of the endings, you must use a special rod to either empower or disable six obelisks scattered across the valley. These obelisks are clearly marked with red crosses on the map, so tracking them down is not difficult. The game requires balance in your choices: siding too heavily with one option results in the game ending prematurely with a bad ending after four consistent actions.
This limitation is not too problematic, as you can continue from the last autosave, and the game also provides multiple manual save slots. After charging the rod appropriately, you can travel to the large tower on the far side of the valley, opposite the hotel, and interact with an orb to trigger the ending. Unfortunately, the endings are quite brief, consisting of only a few sentences before you are returned to the main menu.
There may be a hidden true ending, but finding it would be extremely difficult due to the lack of quality-of-life features that could help with thorough exploration. Collectibles, such as manuscripts tied to achievements, are easy to miss even with the visual hints turned on. Since there is no indicator showing if there’s a manuscript at a given location, and no visual cues pointing to them, you have no reliable way of knowing where to search.
Some hotel rooms remain locked, and it is unclear whether their keys even exist. There are also several missing entries in the Mindmap that I was unable to locate. Because you cannot return to the starting city, any missed content there becomes permanently inaccessible once you move too far into the game.
Ultimately, this is a pure exploration game that focuses more on the journey than the destination. While the early game is promising and the world invites curiosity, the overall appeal gradually fades as you realize that the environment offers little beyond scattered notes and lore fragments.
Exploring without visual aids can be rewarding, but I still wish the game offered a way to experience all of its content without forcing players to search blindly for tiny clues hidden in vast spaces. Nonetheless, for those who enjoy slow, meditative exploration and piecing together a world through fragments, the game provides a unique and atmospheric experience.
