Game: Lost Dream: Darkness
Genre: Adventure
System: Nintendo Switch (Also on Steam (Windows))
Developer|Publisher: Morning Shift Studios | Ultimate Games
Age Rating: EU 7+ | US Everyone
Price: US $4.99 | UK £4.49 | EU € 4,99
Release Date: April 14th, 2023
Review code provided with many thanks to Ultimate Games.
Light to Dark
Lost Dream: Darkness is a short adventure game where you play as a spirit fox walking towards the light. And that’s basically it. There’s no challenge, no narrative, not really anything but a go from point A to point B experience.
Probably for the first time writing for this delightful website, I was quite lost for words approaching a review for this title. I started playing it, and easily under half an hour, the experience was over. To keep it short, I do not recommend this one. But if you stick around for the rest of the review, I’ll do my best to describe my experience.
The game is about the journey from darkness to light. Playing as a mystical spirit fox, you begin in a dark area with rain pouring down. In the text, the fox tells you, ‘it’s been raining for way too long’ just in case you couldn’t work that out, thanks to the ambient soundtrack. From there, you literally walk through a bland open environment of trees and landscape.
At one point, I found another wolf turned to stone, but it didn’t seem to relate to anything. As you move from area to area, the world feels a little more alive with foliage. Trees feel more alive with leaves, grass sprouts from the ground, and pockets of flowers bloom. Then before you know it, the fox says, ‘I see the light,’ you walk into said light and the game returns to the main menu. The End. I guess one could look at this and say it’s a representation of working through depression or facing up to a difficult challenge, but it doesn’t present its message effectively.
Stroll in the Woods
The graphics are incredibly bland and just lifeless. It’s just you and the environment, no semblance of other life other than your own wolf existence. While there are wide open landscapes, trees will pop into view, and if you tilt the camera too much, you see through the bottom of the game environment. Performance just feels rough on Switch even when I started the game initially; it cut to the main menu twice. Not sure if this was a crash, but either way, all of this took me out of the experience. The soundtrack was okay, focusing more on the ambience, such as rain falling and birds chirping as you went into the more sunny environments. It felt like something taken directly from a meditation CD or app. An activity I think I would rather perform than play through this again.
Controls are passable. I didn’t feel I was getting the full spirit wolf experience since all I was doing was walking and sometimes swimming from one side of an area to another. You can jump if you fancy just to mess around or leap on top of a rock I guess, but this is never used to overcome an obstacle. For some reason, your wolf has an attack button even though the game is devoid of any other presence to use this against. One wonders if there was supposed to be more to the game at some stage that just wasn’t implemented.
Conclusion: Take a Walk
That’s basically Lost Dream: Darkness. A bland game where you walk from one point to another. This feels like a pretty good project for a new developer testing the waters in game development. The trouble is this does nothing to stand out; there are other better wolf options or walking simulators out there. As it stands, this is something that might catch gamers’ eye as a cheap pickup on the eShop. For me, I get more soothing for my soul by going for a walk and listening to the birds. This was not the meditation session I was looking for, leaving me more confused by the presentation of the game than relaxed.
Final Verdict: I Don’t Like It
