First Impressions: Bad Dream: Coma (NS)

 

I had had my eye on Bad Dream: Coma for some time and like most games that I have purchased over the last three months, I purchased this on the Nintendo Switch during a sale and after playing Donut County, I knew that I wanted to play a game that could be played at a slower pace and one that I could dive into frequently before falling asleep.  Bad Dream: Coma seemed like the perfect title for that very purpose, and I was also interested to see if I would indeed have bad dreams.  Sorry, I had to say that at least once.  I am currently writing this article after only having gotten to the third chapter*, but I feel that I am well versed enough to put down my first impressions.

First off, like a lot of games from varying genres, Bad Dream: Coma has multiple endings, or at least the promise of them as when you start out the game, on the pause screen, you are shown the available ending you have: Good Ending, Neutral Ending, and Bad Ending.  I bring this up early in the article because it was not something that I assumed I could have an effect on during the first chapter, completely altering how a significant portion of the game would unfold.  In a lot of point-and-click games, I am of the mind that if I can interact with it, I am going to click on it.  BD:C is the first point-and-click game of recent memory that has consequences not only for clicking on certain things but how you click on them.  I discovered this on my first playthrough when I clicked on a crow, it died, and shortly after I pressed paused and found out that I had caused the Good Ending to be scribbled out.

Realizing that clicking on the crows killed them, I decided that I would restart the game and avoid the crows entirely; not that avoiding a stationary object is difficult, but when you reach a point in a point-and-click game when you feel like you have clicked on everything, clicking on those crows starts to look real friendly.  This further comes down to two things, at least for me.  The first is point-and-click games in general creating puzzles that are somewhat difficult to decifer, especially when you combine multiple screens and an inventory system that does not require you to use all of your items before the end of a particular chapter.  The second is the visual aesthetic in BD:C, which is all in a hand-drawn style, which I do actually really like.  In games like Goetia, there is the option to press a single button that essentially highlights objects that you can interact with, which helps when there is ambient lighting or just difficult to tell when a knife on a table can be picked up or is just there to add flavor to a dining room scene.  In BD:C, because everything has a hand-drawn look to it and there not being the option to highlight what can be clicked on, at least on the Switch, I found myself passing over objects like a key that was on the counter that I needed to pick up to access a door back down a previous hallway. You know, maybe that is a fault of playing on the Switch, with a 4 inch by 9.4-inch screen, it can be kind of easy to miss details.  Thankfully though, there is a question mark over important objects that you can interact with and the game does tell you immediately if an object like the car keys cannot be used to cross a gap in the middle of an overpass.  I have also found that frequently you have to notice minor changes in screens to know that you can interact with an object, like that snail that was previously not there on the path through the swamp the last time you passed by the screen before you had picked up the shaker of salt.

My biggest critique lies purely in the way the game operates, and maybe this is me being a product of the current gaming culture/mentality.  I wish there were more frequent autosaves or at least a save feature apart from the autosave.  From what I can tell, the game saves halfway through a chapter and again when you complete it.  And that is it.  Why this bothers me is that I do not always have or want to spend time on a point-and-click game with the threat of having to replay everything I spent the last 30+ minutes doing.  Is this entitled?  Maybe this autosave only mechanic is part of a purposeful intention and connected to being able to eliminate available endings with a single action so that you can exit back to the main menu if you do something you regret, like breaking in a doll's head with a crowbar or getting your fingers bitten off by a strange bird-like creature blocking your pathway on a bridge.  There have been a number of times that I have decided to not play BD:C because I knew that I was just starting a chapter and would need to invest a chunk of time trying to solve puzzles, collect objects without being able to play anything else on the Switch in the meantime.

Because of this semi-anxiety about investing time into one game that is somewhat stressful (not just this game, but point-and-click games in general), I have resorted to using a walkthrough (spoilers) over on Steam's message boards for when I am unable to find the last star which was back on the drawing at the beginning of the stage that I mistook for a map that I needed to remember to dig somewhere between two trees; trust me it will make sense.  Maybe this makes me a bad gamer, but it is either that or turning off the game and coming back to spend 20 minutes instead of 30 redoing everything and hoping that I can remember everything that I did and all the things that might have altered the available endings.  I do plan on finishing Bad Dream: Coma because there is a lot that enjoys about the game despite the stress about saving and knowing that I could mess up my chances of getting the Bad Ending**

So on I trudge through this bad dream, trying to figure out how to wake up, I assume from a coma the main character finds themselves in.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Vision of that Massacre Still Haunts Me to this Day

* P.S.  By the time I finished this article, I had just finished Chapter 4, so I am steadily making my way through.  I just did not want to give the impression that I was giving up or not wanting to play.

**P.P.S.  After the first stage on my second time starting the game, I still had access to all three endings, but during the second stage, I killed some spiders at the request of one of the characters and that put me down the path of only the Bad Ending. I guess I did not need to start a new game with one of my other accounts for the purpose of experiencing the Bad Ending.  I may actually go back after beating the game and going through trying not to kill anything and remember that I have a pair of gloves whenever I need to pick prickly flowers.  Maybe.  We will see.