1. Dreaming Sarah is a quick and thoughtful game that you can play in one evening w/o getting too crazy w/ the caffeine. Unless you want to. That's your choice, people.
2. It looks like an old-school platformer at first glance but it's really more of an adventure game--sort of a less-action oriented take on the Legend of Zelda formula.
3. The retro vibe comes in part from its pixel art graphic style. If it came out today, I'd say the art was heavily inspired by Undertale but the reality is that Dreaming Sarah actually came out six months before Undertale. Still, we are looking at low-res, bit-era inspired graphics w/ some modern touches here and there for the sake of style.
4. The music is so central to this experience that the composer, Anthony
Septim, is mentioned by name before the game starts and nobody else is,
not even the person who designed and programmed the thing. Septim's takes influence from music contemporary to the games that inspired its graphical style but it is really quite different from the music you'd expect to hear in those games. It's 90s music but not 90s game music. Suffice to say breakbeats and warm synths are abound. It sounds great and could easily stand alone w/o the game.
5. Dreaming Sarah really just pops you right into things w/o taking any time to explain things. You wake up on a platform in what appears to be some sort of woods.You not given any sort of direction as far as where to go or what you need to do.
6. I've played Metroid before so my first instinct in this situation is to head left. Let us just say that I think the developers of this game have also played Metroid.
7. Or maybe not--one of the better qualities Dreaming Sarah has is that many of its interlaced tasks can be completed in different orders. Of course, access to certain areas is restricted by collecting key items so there is a good deal of linearity to it but you get to do a lot of free-roaming and it seldom feels unproductive.
8. The many varied landscapes featured throughout the game really help w/ this. The whole thing is broadly surreal but some sections more so than others. As mentioned, you start in an only slightly-strange seeming forest but your adventure brings you to slightly strange seeming beaches and very strange looking underworlds, underwater caves and so forth. Every section has a different vibe to it--the music helps a lot--and that keeps the exploration from feeling repetitive.
9. Dreaming Sarah has found a way to make water levels not annoying: it turns you into a fish.
10. Story-wise, there is not much here. There is a brief description what's going on if you look at the game's webpage but that info is not really in the game. You are in this dream world and there is only one thing that it is clear you need to do: go further. Eventually, you get a rudimentary explanation of why you were deposited in this magical forest but that is fairly deep in the game.
11. To me, this feels very much like the kind of game you reach for the controller to play but I guess it was designed for keyboard. Even w/ the controller plugged in, you still get prompted for keyboard key presses. It's kind of weird but the controller layout was intuitive enough it didn't matter.
12. There was one puzzle in this I couldn't solve because I didn't realize there was a puzzle to be solved. That was kinda annoying. The rest of the puzzling is satisfying as far as it goes though. The challenge is more in remembering key places and trying new things as you find new items than anything that requires a serious brain bending.
13. I don't know what any given person might want out of Dreaming Sarah but it delivered what I wanted from it to me. It is a place to lose yourself in for a few hours and a fulfilling experience overall. It relies on a sense of adventure alone to keep it going w/o much in the way of action and is all the more absorbing for it.
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