Review: D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die

You play as David Young, a detective who can go back in time in hopes to prevent his wife’s murder. Boston accents and incredibly strange modulated robot voices are prevalent and questionable. You live with Amanda, a scantily-clad woman who is mentally a wild cat. This is compounded with your partner Forest Kaysen (from past Swery games) who eats way too much food and continually gets excited about clam chowder. The mix of characters is easily the driving point to the game. They bring forth an incredibly strange sense of humor that is a spectacle to watch (not to mention the bright and colorful art style showcasing all this). Dark Dreams Don’t Die feels unique through and through and it’s awesome to see something so weird on the Xbox One.

D4 is a point and click adventure game that can be played with either kinect motion controls or a standard controller. There are also voice commands (during dialogue trees) that work great regardless of your preferred input method. Walk icons crowd the environment in order to move around and you will highlight and select many, many, many objects in order to interact with them. The kinect controls work fine for all these movements but I opted out of using them as the gamepad was simply quicker and easier. You can switch between controls easily by either holding your arm in the air or holding down a button. It was nice to see that the game worked totally fine in a seated position and it’ll even pause automatically if the camera sees you leave the play area. It easily controls well enough to play through with the kinect if you wanted.

Observing objects and interacting with the environment will cause you to slowly lose stama. This makes David tired and forces you to have to continuously eat food to maintain a filled bar. The problem is that you will encounter this issue constantly. The game rewards you for interacting and selecting as much as possible so you end up constantly back pedaling to the in-game store to purchase more food. Over and over you will have to retread the same path just to refill your stamina bar before it gets drained again. It’s an annoying disconnect between what the game wants you to do and how it’s preventing that from happening smoothly.

Season one is split up into three episodes - one prologue and two main - that get the run time to around four hours. The episodic structure works well as each one revolves around a different time jump that you will go on. They even end off on some great moments causing engaging cliffhangers. My one concern was with how the final moments played out. A serious revelation happens but the season ends just as David is about to confront it. This cut makes you anxiously want more but it also leaves the season without any form of resolution at all. The ending feels abrupt and incomplete with many further ties to wrap up in the future. It makes the season feel like there should have been more.

Weird aspects and odd design choices are what made D4 unique and interesting. The characters are silly and, along with the surrounding mystery, keep you wanting to engage with what is to come next. It’s a shame that part of the game design almost limits this progression and can slow down your enjoyment of it. The episodes are filled with some great moments and, despite an abrupt ending, keep you playing. Dark Dreams Don’t Die is wacky and fun and I’m looking forward to more.