Nila Dhuma

Dreams are often thought to have certain meanings when people have them, and there’s an entire pseudoscience designed to come to your help if you need to find out the significance of a particular dream. Granted, dreams are not necessarily 100% understood by real science either, but it’s quite difficult to believe that they are symbolic representations of things to come.

Nila Dhuma is an interesting kinetic visual novel in which you follow the story of someone who finds himself on a train somewhere across the galaxy. Since there is no interaction involved, this means that you are not allowed to choose anything when it comes to how your character interacts with everyone else. It’s a bit of a bummer, but then again it’s nice to lay low and listen to a story every now and again as well.

In this case, the story is not that great, unfortunately, especially since it’s pretty rushed and somewhat badly written. There are all sorts of grammar mistakes that ruin the atmosphere, even if there’s not much of an atmosphere to begin with. The whole premise is a bit silly and difficult to grasp, and it comes off as pretentious for the sake of being pretentious.

The characters are not very intriguing either, unfortunately, even if they are theoretically designed to be as outlandish as possible. There’s a weird guy with a mask, a pink alien, and another weird guy with a hat, none of which have any kind of personality to stick with you after the story is over. Granted, the whole thing lasts only thirty minutes or so, so maybe it would have been a better idea to feature fewer characters to begin with.

Unfortunately, not even the graphics manage to save the game, because there’s nothing exciting in this regard either. In fact, the backgrounds are just photos with a couple of filters on top, which is a pretty lazy way to present a visual novel. On top of that, the characters are very simple as well, and the soundtrack is not award-worthy either.

In the end, Nila Dhuma may appeal to certain people, but it’s quite clearly unpolished and definitely not ready for the serious public. However, the main idea had some potential, if only the developers took more time to flesh it out and pay more attention to detail.