Dreamland

The early autumn brings forth one of the children’s most favorite entertainments – the traveling carnival. The smell of candy floss and popcorn, clowns’ laugh, sparkling lights and whirlpool of merry-go-rounds… Dreamland, the recent project by NevoSoft,  captures this atmosphere excellently. But they have also managed to catch the spirit of intension and alarm in the air, which overtake you just as you start playing.

The carnival is run by the spiteful dwarf who likes to play games with people’s soles, and the pay for losings is too high.  This time it’s your brother who is trapped by the dwarf to keep the youth inside the carnival forever, and you have to beat the wizard at his own game as you solve his puzzles, find hidden objects and try to exit from the dwarf’s labyrinth. Such a storyline is already enough to try Dreamland to rattle your nerves! The gameplay is not less captivating. The carnival scenes are defended by the gates, each of them representing a mini-game or a puzzle. As you’ve gone in through the gates, there is another challenge. Each amusement ride demands a ticket, which can be bought for a special coin obtained during the game. You use this coin to play the Wheel of Fortune, the dwarf’s main conundrum for you! Coupled with the very non-typical plot, Dreamland gameplay absorbs you like the enchanted carnival absorbs the losers.

Dreamland dark and gloomy graphics make the ambiance which immerses you into the carnival on pain of staying there forever to the extent that it gives the habdabs. Generating the atmosphere is the unostentatious but ominous music, obsidious sounds of squeaking trees, whispering foliage and so on, and the dwarf’s everpresent gloating voice coming from a loudspeaker as you move from one location to the other.

All the forgoing is just a scintilla of what can be said about Dreamland. Eye-catching and challenging, Dreamland is whatever you want to experience in a Hidden Object game. It’s the joy for your eyes, ears and intellect while you struggle with the evil lying beneath a childhood imagination.

24, June 2011