Nightmare Land - The Dream Witness Review

Staggering out of the flaming wreckage of my car, I take a moment to orient myself. The moon is huge overhead, casting its pale radiance over what should be a quaint dirt road leading up to a picturesque village. But I can feel the fear gathering in my gut – the shadowy beast that ran me off the road is still somewhere nearby.

No, wait, that’s just a giant snail.

Welcome to Nightmare Land - The Dream Witness, a point-and-click (poke-and-prod?) adventure game clearly influenced by the likes of Shadowgate and The Uninvited, in which the stranded protagonist explores a village and its surroundings, uncovering otherworldly threats and searching for a way home. He will need to bypass many dangers and help the locals if he has any hope to survive this short adventure.

And it is a bit short. I finished the whole game in just two sittings, and that was with a couple of the compulsory adventure game ‘cluelessly try every item on everything’ laps around town when I ran out of ideas as to how to proceed. The only in-app purchase is an unobtrusively-offered guide, which I found unnecessary since death is a slap on the wrist and nothing stops the player from brute-forcing their way through the sometimes-obtuse obstacles (I've never met a less useful set of lockpicks in my life, I assure you). Also perfectly typical for an adventure game were the points when I had tried everything I had on everything I could find, and then spent five minutes wandering through the screens tapping on anything that stood out in case I missed something. Inevitably I had, and on I went.

As with so many games in this genre, it's the ambiance that truly makes or breaks the experience, and Nightmare Land has very good ambiance. Most of the time. The music is excellent – eerie and subtle - and does a great job of drawing one in. The background scenes are well-rendered photo manipulations, greatly adding to the effect.

On the other hand, the rest of the art is of starkly different quality. It’s not badly done, but it stands out as dramatically different from the backgrounds. Also, the game can’t seem to settle on what sort of tone it wants to strike. On one screen lurks a terrifying, shadowy beast. The next sees our hero chasing a UFO away from a talkative cow. The mild drug and ‘naughty thoughts’ jokes sit slightly uncomfortably alongside the Asian vampire and the giant snail, and the laser tentacle shows up when least expected – though in all fairness, those things are notoriously hard to anticipate.

Overall, Nightmare Land - The Dream Witness does exactly what it sets out to do: deliver a quick, occasionally oddball adventure. Despite the game’s missteps, I feel like it was a worthwhile way to spend an hour or two. And if one can forgive the uneven art style and occasionally mood-breaking narrative, it can be seen for exactly what it is: a love letter to some of the most classic point-and-click games of yesteryear.