In the distant future, where Earth has been taken over by aliens, a young girl is recruited to fight back, using a variety of weapons and abilities. Daydreamer: Awakened Edition is the console version of the original Daydreamer, which released on PC last year. As a 2D side-scroller, players will need to use all of their platforming and combat abilities to succeed, with five different difficulty levels meaning that the game presents a challenge for anyone of any skillset.
The first thing that you’ll notice about Daydreamer: Awakened Edition is its visual style. Character movement almost looks like a form of rotoscope animation, similar to the original Prince of Persia games from the 1980s. Enemy models are varied, and range from the ordinary, such as robots and sentries, to the extraordinary, which perhaps most resemble a combination of dinosaur and mollusk. All of this is presented against a variety of backdrops, including factories and industrial zones to forests and caves. Perhaps the most striking of these backgrounds is in the ‘Grassy Hills’ level, which resembles a children’s TV show watched while on an acid trip, from eerie smiling clouds to a whole range of colors that just seem off.
In fact, this summary of ‘Grassy Hills’ works for much of Daydreamer. The game is a thoroughly weird experience from start to finish, but this only serves to make it more captivating, as you find yourself looking forward to discovering which oddity lies just around the next corner. You’re able to recruit a range of pets to help you, including turtles, puppies and weasels, and you’ll face off against a number of bosses, which, with names such as Doomflayer, Grimeboy and Mecha-Smiles, are almost guaranteed to haunt your dreams.
There isn’t really much narrative to speak of in Daydreamer, aside from working your way through the levels and defeating bosses, and the structure of the game reflects this. Though there is a numbering system to indicate levels, once you’ve defeated a boss, you can then select your next level as long as it borders the one that you just finished. This makes for a fairly non-linear experience, and should you experience particular difficulty with one level, you can bypass it by selecting another. While all levels feature a mixture of platforming and combat, some levels lean more heavily on one than the other, meaning that most players will be able to work their way through the game in a manner that matches their play style.
There are issues within Daydreamer, unfortunately, and these range from design choices to issues with the game itself. The camera stays pretty close to your character at all times, which can make it difficult to see where you’re supposed to be going, and there were a number of times where I’d be forced to blindly jump into the unknown, hoping that I’d be able to course-correct enroute. More seriously, during one particular boss fight, I first got stuck in a death-loop, where my character was out of health but refused to die, or do anything else, forcing a restart, and once restarted, the same boss caused a pretty serious looking error message to pop-up, which crashed the game entirely and returned me to the PS4’s main menu. I didn’t experience this issue again, or anywhere else, but once was more than enough to make me wary, especially when I hadn’t been doing anything out of the ordinary to cause it.
If you hark back to the halcyon days of platformer, with games such as Flashback, then chances are you’ll greatly enjoy Daydreamer: Awakened Edition. There’s enough content and challenge here to keep the most seasoned platform aficionado busy for some time, and the visual design keeps the game interesting for its duration. It’s not a perfect experience, with camera and coding issues causing eyebrows to be raised, but it’s certainly enjoyable, and in an era when 2D platforming isn’t exactly prominent, you could do a lot worse than picking this up.
