The Dream Machine: Chapter 1 & 2 Demo

The Dream Machine: Chapter 1 & 2 is a classic point and click adventure game developed by a small team from a studio named Cockroach Inc. and published by The Sleeping Machine.

Playing point and click adventure games are pretty straightforward. You figure out the environment, you pick up the clues, and you solve the puzzle. In The Dream Machine: Chapter 1 & 2 players do the same thing, the thing that is different is the game itself. You see, the team didn’t use a complex game engine that takes care of everything for them. They relied on actual, real world materials.

Many of you have already seen how stop motion animation films are made. They always have a certain look about them that sets them apart, even if they don’t look good, even by a long shot. What they do have is personality, mostly because you can feel the energy that has been used to put that together. The same can be said about The Dream Machine: Chapter 1 & 2, which uses a similar technique.

You take on the role of Victor Neff, who just moved into a new apartment with his wife. She’s not home, and Victor is sleeping. He dreams about being stranded on a deserted island, and he figures out a way to survive, at least until he finds an alarm clock that wakes him up.

This is pretty much the extent of the demo, but the fact that it’s extremely short doesn’t really matter. It’s enough to present the nice animations and techniques used by the team for the game. They say that clay, cardboard and broccoli have been used to give live to the sets, and there is plenty of evidence that shows that’s true.

The puzzles don’t seem to be difficult, and they follow a clear logic, at least in the demo part. There appears to be something more going on in the Victor’s world, but players can only find out if they get the full game.

The Dream Machine: Chapter 1 & 2 is built in Adobe Flash, so it’s really small and doesn’t require any kind of major hardware resource.