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Dreamweb  In Brief: Original, noirish game done in by a poor story and bad puzzle design.
An almost perfect example of a game with good ideas done in by poor execution, Dreamweb seems promising at first. After a somewhat incomprehensible intro you find yourself looking down on a bedroom, a woman sprawled across a bed while a ceiling fan beats slowly. This top down view is interesting, and the moody synthesizer score gives a feeling of portent. Looking around the room you find that you can look at and pick up everything in it; every paper, every book, every cup. Dreamweb rids itself of the common scheme of a player only being able to pick up useful items, and this seems pretty cool, an ingenious way of preventing the try-everything-in-your-inventory style of puzzle solving. Stepping out onto the rain-soaked streets late at night it's easy to feel that you've found another Bladerunner-style bit of noir.
Sadly, this all sounds better than it is. The big problem is that you are still not in a real-world situation. When you want to pry the cover off a box, you can only use one particular object, even though a number of others would make just as much sense. And because you can pick up hundreds of objects, guessing the right one can be particularly difficult. This is trial-and-error magnified a thousand-fold.
It's also often unclear what's going on, but eventually it becomes clear that the main character, Ryan, is an assassin on the side of good. This is an interesting idea, to help a man kill a bunch of people to save the world, and makes for an unusually dark story, but it's hard to think like an assasin at times, and I was pretty shocked when the solution for one puzzle, which I got from the UHS file, was to shoot an innocent man.
In the end, a moody score and rainy streets cannot compensate for a confused plot and poorly designed puzzles. After cheating my way through most of the first third of the game I gave up on it entirely. -- Charles Herold -2000
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