Perception and taste count for a lot when reviewing a game. For example, Christophor’s review of another game in this series, Book of Air, accurately describes how this ’hidden items puzzle game’ series plays. You view a rather surreal, detailed, yet almost deserted world through a first person view and solve puzzles; sometimes they’re straight logic challenges, other times you have to find hidden items and use them with parts of the world to proceed. While we’re apparently playing different parts of the series, the game formula is identical between them and the interestingly enough he absolutely loved it, while I have the opposite reaction and feel it lacks character.

Taking place over eighteen ’chapters’, each one to two screens apiece, Dream Chronicles asks you to find all sorts of tiny items hidden in the scene presented to you and figure out where they go. Sometimes it’s quite intuitive, such as a frozen door needing to be thawed by starting a fire nearby and there will be both a fireplace and a match atop it; easily done! Others are harder, either by being genuinely clever or asking you to look extremely close to find what you need. It’s the latter puzzles that are a major problem, because you may be seeking items a mere few pixels in size and not even know specifically what you’re trying to find or what it looks like. Combined with your left analog stick clearly being used as a poor substitute for a traditional mouse cursor, it quickly gets frustrating.

While pixel-hunts are the majority of Dream Chronicles’ content and easily enough to ruin the game, it does have a few good puzzles. Building a copy of a street sign out of tiles with patterns on them is one nice example, and I’ll admit I laughed (in a good way) at a segment where I had to find a large key in order to gain access to a small key... in order to get a smaller key still. The problem is that great segments like these are so very few and far between, with the rest of the game being a chore to slog through if you want to experience those highlights.