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Build letters into words, with optional rhymes, December 29, 2022I tested Dream Pieces for IFComp 2013 and remembered enjoying it, so I pulled it out again. It wasn't a hugely complex game, but it has a premise it was hard to dislike. You are in your room and need to get out, because it's your birthday, and there's a party waiting for you. There are items in the room you can break up. For instance, a desk breaks up into a DE and a K. You don't use the S.
Some things, you can't break right away, and you need an item that can destroy them. Building such an item is the first puzzle. Another is for destroying really big items. I enjoyed this whole process of building and destroying, and if it's a bit on rails, I think that's better than being too arbitrary--I found the puzzles challenging without being too frustrating, though there's a small risk they may be not challenging enough or not user-friendly enough either way. But on the whole, I like the balance. There are limited items, and if you understand the conventions of parser games, you know what you need.
What I'm really impressed with is the stuff I didn't remember. The author has done some neat work to improve DP post-comp. Rhymes are optional--I remember some reviewers bemoaned the rhymes, which I think are good for a non-native speaker. There are cheery sound effects when you do something right, and color coding may help you figure what goes with what. Quest allowing drag-and-drop or clicking for verbs is a big help, too, and this is one area where it might be better than Inform. You don't have to guess the verb.
DP feels like a neat wordplay game for people who enjoy the genre but might not be really hard-core. After many years, I was glad to come back to it, and I enjoyed seeing the features I forgot, some I now remembered the author saying "I can sneak that in before IFComp" and others he said he might like to try post-comp. He did.
