A Dream of Silence: Act 3, by Abigail Corfman
As a straight white dude, for good or ill I very rarely find myself second-guessing my opinions too intensively. I mean, I like to think that I’m pretty ecumenical in my viewpoints, and when it comes to reviewing it’s frequently the case that I’ll like something but understand why other folks might not, or find something doesn’t have much personal appeal while getting the reasons why it might be generally popular. But every once in a while I hit a game like A Dream of Silence. I really like everything else by Abigail Corfman I’ve ever played; D&D adventures are one of my guilty pleasures; heck, while I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3 the earlier games in the series are among my all-time favorites. So when I bounced off the first part of this game (which was entered in this year’s Spring Thing) so hard my ears are still ringing, I couldn’t help feeling like there was something off in my judgment – maybe the first third is just slow and I’ll like the other parts better? Maybe if I was more familiar with BG3 in general, or Astarion, the elven vampire who’s the primary character here, in specific, the emotional beats would resonate more? Maybe if I had more experience with and native affinity for fanfiction I’d better vibe with an unabashed fan-game? Maybe I’m just working out sublimated resentment towards the DnD branding people for slapping “Baldur’s Gate 3” on a game whose connections to the first two seem superficial at best?
So I was looking forward to trying to play this culminating part of the game as an opportunity to start with a blank slate, reset my expectations, and try and find the positive elements in the scenario that other reviewers could detect in the first part. But while I definitely enjoyed my time with part three far more than I did with the prologue, my overall take stands: neither the narrative and mechanical elements of Dream of Silence really work for me, and I remain bummed out about that fact.
The setup for the series is that a random encounter with a nightmare-inducing beastie that feeds on fear has thrown Astarion into a catatonic state where he psychically relives his time in thrall to his vampiric sire; you’re able to exploit a telepathic connection to try to help him escape by joining him in the dream, albeit only showing up as a spirit whose ability to sense, much less impact, the environment is profoundly limited. Act 1 turned on understanding your predicaments and balancing your exploration of the cell where Astarion was trapped with building your nascent Sight, Speech, and Touch skills and maintaining his physical and mental well-being. As Act 3 begins, Astarion has finally managed to get out of the cell after what he’s experienced as several months of solitary confinement, and it’s up to you to help guide him past his vampire siblings in search of a way out.
I’ll come back to the narrative side of things in a bit, but first I need to go into more detail on how the gameplay works. This is an RPG-inflected game, and you need to prioritize the three aforementioned skills – you’ll be pretty good at one, middling at a second, and miserable at a third. As a spirit, your actions are also constrained by a ten-point energy gauge; anything you do of any significance will eat up at least one chunk of energy, and even on the easy “Explorer” difficulty setting, you get pretty much just one recharge per encounter with the quartet of characters who stand between Astarion and freedom. Each scene progresses with dialogue, and potential physical conflict, between your companion and his brothers and sisters; meanwhile, you’re also given the opportunity to explore the environment, rifle through the furniture, check out the paintings, etc. Depending on your decisions, various gauges will fill: Astarion’s trust in you has been a key stat since Act 1, while getting clues and moving past obstacles will increase your progress towards escape, and taking too much time or drawing attention ticks up a gauge tracking his sire’s focus on him.
Spelled out like that, it’s a reasonable set of systems, but in practice I found them pretty enervating. You don’t have nearly enough energy to take even a quarter of the potential actions offered in each scene, so the opportunity cost of deciding to do anything is quite high. What’s worse, this is not a game that embraces a fail-forward ethos; you definitely can waste energy trying stuff that’s completely pointless and uninteresting, and while Explorer difficulty is tuned easy enough that that won’t prevent you from getting to the ending, it’s still pretty dispiriting and wound up discouraging experimentation. It’s also the case that there are significant elements of the game that are walled off from certain characters: I prioritized touch last, which felt like a reasonable choice (given that this is a game about interacting with Astarion, knowing what’s going on and being able to talk to him felt more important), but that meant that I was basically unable to participate in what appears to be a reasonably robust combat system. That’d be all well and good, except a large portion of the exploration rewards are focused on said system; I was especially annoyed when, prior to the final confrontation, I treaded almost all my energy to explore what was clearly flagged as a high-risk, high-reward situation, only to find a weapon that neither I nor Astarion could do anything with.
The other way I found the mechanics undermined the experience is that your explorations are bifurcated from the interactions Astarion is having with the other vampires; their charged pas-de-deux play out in a “watch” tab, while you mess about with the scenery in the “explore” tab. Time generally only passes in the former, thankfully, but at the same time the act of swapping back and forth makes the conversations, and in fact the broader plot, feel disjointed; the fact that I was continually thinking to myself “is this an important enough moment to try to use some of my precious energy?” made this intrusion of the mechanics into the narrative all the more awkward. And the story isn’t sufficiently compelling to power past these points of friction: Astarion clearly has history with the other characters, who’ve all taken different tacks for coping with a sire who’s clearly signposted as an abuser, but in their limited screen-time the best-drawn only manage to inhabit a stereotype, while the others are just forgettable.
Meanwhile, because you and Astarion are so focused on escape, the trust mechanic – and the relationship that it’s meant to model – feels besides the point; the only time I noticed it was when I was told his trust in me wasn’t quite high enough to trigger a bit of bonus dialogue when we were almost free, which hardly felt like an impactful toggle. Sure, you wouldn’t usually expect deep relationship-building in the middle of a long action scene. But remember, this is basically a dream sequence, with all the challenges that entails: none of the dangers, or other characters, really matter at all, it’s only the relationship between the protagonist and Astarion that has any lasting significance, so relegating it to second fiddle is a substantial miss.
The one big grain of salt in all of this is that I did skip past Act 2 – when starting this third piece, you’re given the choice either to replay the series from the beginning, or play a condensed version of the first two parts. I opted for the latter, since as mentioned I wanted a clear break from my earlier impressions and replaying a first act that I’d already found quite slowly-paced seemed like a bad way of accomplishing that. It’s quite possible that in the grand tradition of fantasy trilogies, the middle section is the best part – and I’m not just saying that, I can easily see that the segment of the story before the action has kicked off, but after the setup has been introduced, could be the place where deep character work is happening. But it was Act 3 that was entered into the Comp for evaluation, not 2 and 3 together, and at this point I feel like I’d be doing everyone, myself included, a favor by not playing it and letting myself imagine that that’s where all the great stuff I typically associate with the author’s games resides – it’s either that keep fretting that I’ve somehow completely missed the point again.
