Reverie

Reverie, is something else. You’re the applicant for a job where you have to degauss the dreams of people you don’t know and will never meet. It’s an abstract exploration game in which you will hear the subjects narrate their dreams, leaving you to make sense of it all.

Whatever Reverie actually is by definition, it certainly is different. Abstract games have come in a wide range of forms and varying content. This one adds to the list of well-crafted creations that, even though don’t make a lot of sense at first, get to you on a deeper level. Or at least that should be its purpose.

In Reverie you degauss the dreams of others as part of your application for a job at the Reverie Corporation. That’s all the background you get and past that, it’s just navigating from one audio node to another and hearing out what each one has to tell. Every node will speak of a different thing but since they are connected, you never really know if you’re just dealing with one person’s mind or several.

Even more confusing is the fact that most of the dreams in the nodes are represented by two voices, and some of them become strange.

Reverie is not a game in the traditional sense. It’s a narrative but the kind that you piece together in your mind because it alone doesn’t have logic you can really grasp. Or maybe, it’s not as profound and complicated as I initially thought. What if it’s just one man’s means of exploring with game design? Even so, it’s an interesting approach.

It was built for a game jam session and, for this reason, there is some shallowness to it, in the voice acting and the possibilities you have. Nonetheless, this should serve as an inspiration for others and hopefully, its creator will see the potential to something intricate and thought provoking.

To end, Reverie is truly appealing in the way it looks, sounds and especially in the way you navigate through the dream network. Should development for it continue, it has the potential to be quite the mind bender if a good plot is added to it.