The Dreamhold 9+

Good introduction to text adventures, tricky fantasy adventure

I really enjoyed the writing and atmosphere in this magical fantasy story. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Myst, but is told entirely through text.
Magic and surreal events take place in this game, like a dream. Your task is to explore the (small) world and figure out what happened and who you are.

Besides being an atmospheric game, It is deliberately designed as an introduction to text adventures (also known as interactive fiction) and does a good job of coaching you through the way to solve these games, which can be frustrating if you don’t find the right way to think about the puzzles. I have played a few a long time ago, so I didn’t fully need the tutorial, but it was still helpful.

The tutorial will help you solve the basic plot, although there is still significant challenge. Beyond that, there are many optional parts to explore, which are relatively tricky to solve, but some of the most awesome and surreal.

I found these optional parts pretty hard to solve and resorted to the walkthrough to discover some.

There is also a backstory, but it is told in a very fragmented way that makes it hard to understand. It came across more as ‘mysterious scenery’ than a useful story to me.

A small complaint is that some of the physical-style puzzles like the Orrery (a working model of planets) and the cistern seemed really awkward to solve through text. A picture really would be worth a thousand words here, even though the words were well written! I found myself battling the games ‘parser’ in these puzzles to express myself.

Overall, a very good game, I wish the author would do more magical fantasy