You sank my battleship!
D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die is the craziest game I’ve played in years. It comes from the mind of director Swery of Deadly Premonition-fame, and is just bizarre with a capital B. It starts out simple enough…you get used to the controls, the style of the game feels very like a Telltale one like The Walking Dead/The Wolf Among Us and then it just starts making less and less sense.
You play as David Young, a detective in Boston who retired from the BPD after his wife Little Peggy was murdered and with her final words told David to “Look for D…”, which he then proceeds to do with his special “gift” in which he can use an object that has been in a specific time/location and “dive” into that time and place, when he’s knocked unconscious he wakes in the apartment bathroom for some reason.
David’s ex-partner and friend gives him a memento to dive onto a plane where a witness who knows the identity of D vanished mid-flight. David comes across a number of flamboyant and bizarre characters on-board while trying to find clues. The game is set in an episodic format with the first season consisting of the Prologue, Episode 1 and 2. Sadly, they are very short and Episode 2 ends on a cliffhanger that is just as crazy as the rest of the game.
The worst is that I don’t know when Season 2 will land, if it ever does. It’s an Xbox One exclusive with optional Kinect support, which is lucky since I don’t have the room to manoeuvre Kinect at the moment. I want to find out who D is and why David is constantly seeing Little Peggy every where he goes, also some explanation as to who is Amanda? Other than a free-loading woman who dresses and acts like a cat, yet is a proper cat on the plane. More madness from Swery…
You can go through the game multiple times, collecting credits to spend on food, costumes, music as well as trying to unlock the game’s achievements. Just be warned that at the time of writing, some appear to be glitched. Hopefully it’ll get patched soon, but we know that some glitchy achievements don’t always get fixed.
The visual style of D4 is very like Telltale’s Walking Dead series, but with a Japanese-anime style to it. Music is pretty random as well, while the voice-acting is a mixed bag between good lines, corny dialogue, cheesy moments and some very random ones.
The Verdict
D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die has the makings of a good series, but it fails to deliver thanks to an incredibly short first season, glitchy achievements and no indication of whether the series will return anytime soon or not. However, it does provide a good story, full of crazy randomness that Swery is famous for. Hopefully we’ll get a Season 2, but until then it’s hard to determine whether it was all worth it or not.
