Then the small slit of the now-closed eye begins disappearing entirely. You can still walk and run and jump in this state, but you're depicted by nothing more than a light sheen on the ground. Once this eye closes fully, Prieto turns invisible. Everywhere you travel, a timer is ticking down, as represented by an eye slowly closing in the top right of your screen and a white fog closing in from the sides. Prieto's existence is fueled by a glowing white flower called the Gypsophila (it's Baby's Breath, for us non-botanists I looked it up). Your goals are generally pretty clear throughout, but there are a lot of surreal concepts and weird realities being juggled at any given moment in Onirike. After completing a short item-swapping quest for them, the Clown becomes Prieto's mentor, setting him on his grand quest: Prieto must leave the circus and find the cowardly Gatekeeper, who will give him access to every area of the Orb so that he can find all seven fragments of a key to unlock the legendary Well of Truth, which is said to make dreams come true. The narration is not without its quirks, which I'll get to shortly, but the acting brings a real charm that lightens the otherwise dark tone of the gothic, bizarre, and occasionally gross world you inhabit.Įxploring the circus one night, Prieto meets the greedy pink blob Grand Mac, collector of oddities and squeezer of cows, and the kindly but desperate Clown, who suffers under the control of a wooden puppet. Actress Lisa Fox is expressive and warm, performing all the roles with big, bold character voices that never stray too far from her own register, like when your parents read you storybooks as a child. The young woman narrating all this background is a fantastic and soothing presence as you explore the Orb. Prieto, who spends most of his time picking flowers, feels like he's somehow different from the rest and is determined that he’s going to get out of here. A magician pulls a never-ending string of handkerchiefs from its mouth. A stout gumdrop-shaped creature chases a carrot dangling from the end of a stick that's tied to its head. A seal endlessly twirls a ring on its nose. He lives in a circus full of other dreams that are supposedly just like him, each locked eternally in a basic cyclical loop. You control Prieto, a personified dream that never came true, in a strange world called the Orb. What happens to dreams that don't come true? Do they repeat on an endless loop until they fizzle out and die? Or do some unresolved dreams have the ability to take on a life of their own, and, through their own grit and determination, fight their way out into the world and come to fruition after all? This is the rather abstract metaphor central to Onirike, a dark and complex but sweet 3D platforming adventure from DevilishGames that is fun and engaging, if relatively simplistic, throughout its fairly short play time.
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