That’s Like A Dream Review

3 minutes of reading / By /

That’s Like a Dream is a kinetic visual novel that has us play as an unnamed man living with his father. It begins with our character waking up from a deep sleep and opening a window to let the warm breeze sweep across his face. A peaceful scene, right? Wrong. He is not too pleased by the sensation. We quickly come to realize that this man has some form of depression or other affliction as we read his inner thoughts. Having begun the day on the wrong foot, our character walks downstairs and immediately becomes annoyed by his father’s radio. With not so much as a “good morning”, we’re told that our mother is calling us. Fantastic. There is, however, one minor issue. Our mother is dead.

I will refrain from talking about the plot further than this. Believe it or not, that’s nearly half of the content. This is not a ten-minute read, as claimed. You’ll be lucky to get five. I was shocked by how little substance there was to the narrative. There is little that the title wants to say or for us to think about. The symbolic metaphor of the doll is clear, yet it goes nowhere. That’s an issue when the entire premise hinges on that point. It’s handled nearly dismissively, which I attribute to the low word count in this visual novel. A case could be made that it signifies depression, and the lack of narrative drive is symbolism. This is a stance I disagree with. Bringing up a heavy subject, briefly setting it up, and stepping back for readers to infer what’s happening only works when the theme isn’t painfully obvious.

What is an objective flaw is the grammar. This is a rough translation into English containing plenty of strangely worded sentences. While decipherable, we occasionally have to do a double-take to ensure we understand the developer. Stranger still is that English is the only language available. There is no Japanese, so we could use AI instead of reading this translation. It’s just incredibly bizarre all around. Only a few graphic assets were used throughout, all devoted to the environments we find ourselves in. The visuals shown as red monochrome quickly catches the eye and was an interesting idea. Like a Dream could have done neat things with the abstract, crimson-red viewpoint that we have. Sadly, not even the doll has artwork for it. Keep your expectations low. It’s all background slides and over before you know it.

This was a difficult title to cover. Being harsh on the Doujin/Indie scene isn’t something I enjoy doing. Paying any money to experience this is just too difficult a proposition, even if it’s 77 US cents. Reading this review will likely take longer than playing through it. The poor grammar ruins the pacing as you play, and the interesting visual style is poorly utilized. With all that said, its premise has potential. The narrative just needs room to breathe and to be told in a better way. There is a saying about brevity: “Words are like leaves; where they most abound, much fruit beneath is rarely found.”. It’s a powerful quote, yet too much distillation is also an objective negative. Describing the Lord of the Rings as “Found ring, Sauron bad, chucked it in trash” is hardly an appropriate way of telling the story. While this may be an extreme example, it conveys the core issue plaguing this title. If you’re on the lookout for niche Visual Novels, I simply can’t recommend That’s Like a Dream.

 

Rating:

 

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