A Dream of Silence: Act 3 by Abigail Corfman
Next up in my random competition playlist is a game labelled as Act 3 of a trilogy. I have not played the first two acts, so that, I thought, might be a problem. It’s not. The game allows you play through a quick summary of the first two acts, which apparently consist of… escaping from a one-room tomb? Doesn’t sound like I missed much, but maybe I’m wrong.
There’s also a long, long list of content warnings in the blurb:
Wow, I thought, this game is going to be dark. But, again, appearances are deceiving. Yes, there’s an evil vampire overlord involved, and we’re being told that there’s a character chained to the ground who has all the bones in her hand deliberately broken, and ouch it hurts so much, but we’re not really experiencing any of it. It’s more that some ‘evil vampire’ tropes are being mentioned on auto-pilot, with no attempt made to make them real or visceral to the player. Which is fine – I’m not here for the torture porn or the vicarious victim blaming euphoria – but it does point towards a certain weakness of the game. More about that later.
One thing that rather inexplicably is not mentioned in the blurb, is that this is a Baldur’s Gate 3 fan game. This puts me in a somewhat weird position as a player and a reviewer. I have not played Baldur’s Gate 3. I have played Baldur’s Gate 2. I’ve played it many times. Indeed, I’m pretty sure that I was at a friend’s in Geldrop the day it hit the Dutch stores and we biked into Eindhoven to buy it, because we couldn’t bear the thought of having to wait for it an hour longer than was strictly necessary. But, you know, things changed; I’ve got kids; I don’t have as much time for gaming as I used to; and so I don’t know anything about Baldur’s Gate 3 except for what you might now from playing the first two games. I don’t even know how much continuity there is from the second to the third game. And this meant that I started playing A Dream of Silence: Act 3 with some trepidation. I was a little bit worried that I wouldn’t understand this game. I was more worried that it might contain big spoilers, because, you know, one day I might find the time to return to the Sword Coast. But I’m willing to trust the author and dive in.
One of the first things that then happened in the game is that I’m asked how my character views Astarion. I chose something non-committal. And the game told me:
I stared at my screen for minutes trying to process this. It made no sense to me, and still makes no sense to me. If the game presupposes that my character cares about what happens to Astarion, then surely it is the job of the author to write the game in such a way that it is clear that my character cares for Astarion, and to not give me any choices that suggest that my character doesn’t. If, on the other hand, the game presupposes that I care about what happens to Astarion, well, the game should not presuppose that; rather, it should do its job and make me care about what happens to Astarion. I find this remark absolutely flabbergasting.
After some soul searching, I decided to play on anyway, despite the earnest warnings. I’m glad I did, because the game is interesting, at least from a mechanical perspective. You’re a ghost; well, not really a ghost, more a dream insert, but it comes down to much the same thing. You have limited energy to interact with the world, and also three numerical skills that determine what kinds of interaction you are best at (social, exploration, physical manipulation). The other main character, Astarion, is the main doer of things, and you are there trying to help out in small ways. Maybe you can give him an idea; or point him at a useful item; or find out something that he doesn’t know about. I like this minimalist approach to player agency, which makes you think hard about what to spend your energy on. I suppose that mechanically it works a bit like all those management type games where you can take only a certain number of actions per day; but here it’s done to put you in the role of a support character who has limited influence on any particular scene. That’s deft and interesting. Early on I worried about the extremely limited amount of energy I had, but I quickly found that there’s a reset in every scene. All in all, even though I played on normal difficulty, I found that I had enough agency to steer the narrative towards a positive conclusion.
So I liked the basic idea and mechanics. The fiction, on the other hand, fell flat. I’m assuming that Abigail Corfman chose to write about this character Astarion because he’s really interesting. But that didn’t come out in the game at all. He’s just some bog-standard vampire in a bog-standard vampire setting. All of this could have been a Vampire: The Masquerade fan fiction and I would not have noticed the difference. (I would have commended the author for not having fetishistically mentioned the character’s clans, I suppose. I can certainly live a good and productive life without ever reading a sentence like: “He was clearly a Brujah.”) Okay, maybe there are no gnomes and half-elves in Vampire: The Masquerade, but a pair of half-pointy ears does not an original setting make.
One problem is this: we’re meeting a lot of characters that mean something to Astarion, but they mean nothing to us. And nothing interesting happens to them. We just meet them, deal with them, then move on; and we don’t even experience much of the dealing, because our character is off exploring the room. The entire story can be summarised as: “we walk through the mansion, meet each of its inhabitants in turn, then walk on, until we reach the end”. In the process we learn nothing about Astarion; we learn nothing about ourselves (surely the first-person introspective nature of the game would have lent itself well to at least showing us the personality and background of the player character, but they remain something of a blank); we learn very little about the Big Bad and his cronies; and we learn very little about the larger setting. The game didn’t give me anything in that respect. It just chugged along and then reached an ending.
Did I enjoy myself? Yeah, I did. I like the mechanics, and the exploration of the scenes is well done. I resented building a four-part sword and then still doing only 2 damage, but okay, I guess that’s what I got for choosing to be bad at physical manipulation. But it never moved beyond that rather basic level of enjoyment; the game never took a step beyond that.