Xbox Reviews

Dreamfall Chapters review

Review Dreamfall Chapters | An emotional story driven game, it’s a rare thing to see, especially on Xbox. With great pleasure did I start my journey with Zoë, what did I think about it? Was it a dream to play or a nightmare to experience? Let’s find out!

THE GOOD

  • Dreamfall Chapters is a game with light-gameplay moments, this will unfortunately scare away a few people but trust me when I say that the game is worth playing. The main reason for that is the excellent storytelling, while it’s a little difficult to get the big picture when you didn’t play the two previous games it’s still an impressive and one-of-the-best stories you’ll find in a video game. Backed by an impressive meaningful decision-system that truly changes the game, you won’t always immediately know how and why but you are always informed with a “The balance has changed” message.
  • You control two playable characters, Zoë and Alvane. It takes a while before the link between them becomes clear but that helps with the mysterious story. While both characters have a pretty good background and time to shine it is Zoë Castillo that becomes the star of the game. A believable, and more importantly, very interesting character that faces quite a few troubles that everyone can understand. She is definitely on par with Chloe and Max from Life is Strange if it comes to character depth. Alvane isn’t all too bad either, but his setting was a little less interesting. (but still good) Same can be said about side-characters, the world is full with weird and “special” living beings. They often come with some emotional-heavy subjects like racism or depression, another reason why I love Dreamfall Chapters so much, the developer wasn’t afraid to use some modern age issues for the game.
  • What really drives the game is the conversations and dialogue, even random NPC have more meaningful voiced lines than most other video games in general. It’s by far one the best in the game industry when you purely look at this feature. Conversations between characters always have more meaning and I was fascinated by each and every person. It totally sucked me in and deserved all my attention.

MIXED FEELINGS

  • Visually the game can look stunning, five minutes later you come across something that could be found with an original Xbox game. So I have a very mixed impression about the graphics, I do have to say that you come across some mind blowing beautiful scenes that features some impressive art work, but not everything is that great.
  • Once in a while you have to solve a puzzle, most of the times you will need to find something and use it on another item, kinda like a point and click game. It was a welcome change of pace, only issue I had with them was the difficulty. It never provided a real challenge, a few bigger and more difficult braincrackers would have been welcome.

THE BAD

  • I love game engine Unity and even though developer Red Thread Games upgraded Dreamfall Chapters to Unity 5 it’s still a shame that they didn’t use a more advanced game engine or optimized it a little more. The game has pretty long and weirdly placed loading times and you get a lot of slowdown and frame rate issues while running around. It never seems to get an acceptable fluid motion. Luckily you stand still for more than half of the time for the engaging conversations but once you start moving around things go a little downhill with technical issues.

Score: 84% | The story and conversations are so good that it’s easy to forgive the technical shortcomings. Dreamfall Chapters is a great example that games like this can work, I sincerely hope that gamers give it a chance, it’s worth it.

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