A Dream of Silence, by Abigail Corfman
I’ve got a conundrum: what’s the opposite of a chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation? I’m a big fan of Abigail Corfman’s mechanically-engaging Twine games, and while I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m sufficiently into Bioware-style RPGs with relationship drama to make the prospect of melding these two things into a fangame where you need to help a BG3 companion explore and escape a traumatic dream-prison via judicious stat-juggling and trust-enhancing conversation immediately appealing. But instead of a delicious Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I feel like I’ve just bitten into – I dunno, a Swedish Fish Oreo? Onion-ring mints? I’m just goggling weird candies now, somebody help me out.
I should say up front that this is an incomplete chunk of what will eventually be a larger game – it consists just of a prologue that sets up the main action, and then a first act that ends just as there’s a glimmer of hope of rescue. Per some notes from the author, it sounds like there’ll also be some beefed-up options for specific kinds of characters to flesh out the interactions. And I think I am at a disadvantage from not having much pre-existing familiarity with Astarion, the game’s central character – I’m dimly aware from the BG3 discourse that he’s a popular character, and Dream of Silence provides an efficient summary both of the larger game’s plot, and Astarion’s basic deal as an elven vampire, that I understood the plot, but I didn’t have any feelings about him one way or the other going into things. So it’s possible my current reactions won’t make as much sense once the full game is out, or for a player who’s already Team Astarion.
With that said, I think there are some interrelated design and narrative decisions here that wind up yucking what should be a yum. On the story side, after an intense, confusing opening that again probably works much better if you’ve played BG3 and know who the various name-checked characters are, things slow way down. See, your party is under attack from a dream-eating monster, which has lead to Astarion being trapped in what appears to be a nightmare based on memories of when he was enslaved by the vampire who turned him. Said nightmare is one of isolated captivity: he’s stuck in a small, near-featureless crypt, slowly starving to death while his mind frays. You’re able to project yourself into the dream to try to rescue him, but only appear as a sort of wraith, with limited ability to interact with Astarion or the environment. While there are a few events that liven things up to a certain degree, for the most part all that happens for the game’s half-hour-ish playtime is fiddling around, unable to accomplish much or have much by way of conversation, while hopefully finding some way to put off his seemingly-inevitable demise.
This is all accomplished via a parser-like interface where you can zoom in on different sub-areas of the crypt and engage with the objects and characters there to the extent of your abilities, which are quite restricted. While you can pick a Dungeons and Dragons class at the outset, as far as I can tell this only provides a very few rare one-off options. For the most part, your capabilities are restricted according to an energy gauge (you get ten points at a time; resting replenishes them, but also reduces Astarion’s HP and sometimes his mental health) and how much you’ve levelled the three core skills of sight, touch, and speech. Speech 1 only lets you produce a vague susurrus of whispers, while higher levels allow you to say single words or even a few at a time; similarly, higher levels of sight give you more insight into your surroundings (and Astarion) while touch helps you interact with your surroundings.
That’s a reasonable enough framework, but the I found the implementation really drags. Partially this is because you need to level up the skills a fair bit to be able to do much, and at the default “balanced” difficulty level, it can take multiple rests to get some skills even up to level two or three (you choose how to prioritize the skills so that there’s one that’s relatively cheap to level, one that’s fairly punishing, and one in the middle). The game does provide you with specific targets to aim for by graying-out options you can’t yet access, but telling you what skill level you’ll need to unlock it. The nature of the tiny playing area, though, is that each level-up only opens up one or two new things, and as far as I can tell it’s not really possible to specialize just in one or two – you’ll eventually need all three to a certain extent. So that leads to a lot of thumb-twiddling gameplay just to move the ball forward a small amount, mechanically speaking.
What’s worse, the narrative impact of your abilities is often quite disappointing. For example, I was excited to get Touch 2, since that would let me pass through walls. But exiting the crypt just revealed that I was tied to Astarion and couldn’t go far, and unlatching the door to make it easier for him to escape required Touch 3. The only other thing I could do was enter a particular, prominent sarcophagus – but popping in just revealed that there were two items there that required Touch 5 to retrieve. This wasn’t a one-off anticlimax, either – once I got Touch 3 and opened up those latches, a skeleton immediately came and re-locked them, with no positive impact. It’s possible that if I’d had my speech skill leveled up further I would have been able to tell Astarion to try something with the door (though I didn’t see even a grayed-out option for that when I checked), but again, levelling up multiple skills is a time-consuming slog.
The nadir probably hit when I tried to use my special paladin power. There was a monster who showed up to menace Astarion, and I was excited to see that I could try to SMITE it – except I needed at least Touch 3 to unlock that option, and in my first playthrough I’d made that my lowest-priority skill and therefore was nowhere near being able to use it. On a subsequent playthrough, I made the appropriate investment so that I could try out the shiny, exciting choice – only to find that smiting the monster didn’t hurt it in the slightest, but drew its attention to me so I lost all my energy for the day and faced ongoing penalties even after resting, which is a far worse result than what you can get by just mumbling “hide” with no class powers and Speech 2.
It could be that these mechanical choices are the game trying to push you to worry less about the environment and more about the NPC, but sadly I didn’t find Astarion himself that engaging, even when I did a playthrough investing heavily in speech. He’s not a very garrulous conversationalist, which is fair enough given that he’s talking to a disembodied ghost, but still, the perfunctory way most exchanges play out is both a bit dull and mechanically punishing since you need to pay energy to keep each back-and-forth going. He also comes off as lightly characterized, despite a few hints of an enjoyably-spiky personality in some of his lines; likewise, nods to his backstory occasionally come to light but since that’s all spelled out in the pre-game infodump there’s not much intriguing about them. And outside of dialogue, he also isn’t especially proactive in taking any actions on his own to try to get himself free. Again, this is narratively reasonable: by the time the game opens he thinks he’s been held captive for fiveish months, so presumably he’s already explored around and tried everything he can think of, but the result is that without the benefit of how he’s established in BG3, I found him a passive, somewhat-generic character who couldn’t bear the weight the game’s structure puts on him.
All of which is to say that on both the mechanical and plot levels, the game creates a lot of tedium and frustration which is thematically relevant but doesn’t provide much for the player to glom onto – and the slow pacing and unrewarding narrative progression are exacerbated by the difficulty level, which at the default “balanced” level required me to start over several times to make progress. The easy “story” mode was slightly faster on the mechanical level, at least (I shudder to contemplate the unlockable hard difficulty), but that didn’t provide much of a patch on the game’s other issues; heck, I got to the end successfully in that playthrough, but it still wasn’t clear what I did to trigger the deus ex machina event that caps off the demo, adding lack of agency to my complaints.
I realize this is a lengthy review that’s more negative and less balanced than I usually try to be, so it’s worth repeating that this is probably due to my frustrated expectations – I went in expecting to really like A Dream of Silence, so I’m still working through the whiplash of bouncing off of it instead. I’m interested enough to still check out the full game, I suppose, but I’ll be sticking to the easiest difficulty and hoping for substantial changes behind the scenes.