I dream of you and ice cream

I dream of you and ice cream is one of those little gems that can be easily overlooked due to the sheer amount daily releases. With its retro graphics and an unforgettable story told solely through images and sounds, this remarkable point and click impressed me with its smarts and ingenuity.

The game tells the story of mankind being enslaved by a terrifying entity. A group of scientists is summoned each day to answer its questions about various aspects of humanity; if the answer is to the entity’s liking, they get another day to live, otherwise they are mercilessly killed. You play as one of these scientists, who is building a mysterious machine while waiting for the day when they will be summoned in front of the entity. While the game doesn’t give you any control on the answers (the story is linear), it’s up to you – the player – to find out what the end purpose of the machine is. The whole gameplay is heavily structured around getting all the necessary parts in order to build it.

In order to acquire these parts, you will need to solve puzzles of assorted difficulty which are located in various rooms of the facility. There are different floors to explore (which unlock over time) each having multiple rooms with all sorts of machines. You’ll need to collect the objects needed to activate the puzzles and assemble the items rewarded into machine parts.

For a point & click game, it shows an interesting difficulty curve: the first few puzzles are rather easy to solve, but the more you explore, the more difficult puzzles you get, culminating with several brain teasers (encrypted codes, perspective mapping puzzles, mechanical puzzles etc). I found only a few of them to be familiar from other games, most of these ideas are quite innovative or variations of puzzles from old books of logical challenges. Good news is that for every two puzzles solved, you get a hint that can be used to further solve another puzzle. Less good news is that you’ll need to solve everything without any hints if you want to obtain all the achievements – however all puzzles are very doable, even if some of them are more on the difficult side.

It took me roughly 2-3h to get through the game without any hints and I really enjoyed the time I spent in it. In my opinion, it’s a nice buy for $5, but chance is that you will play it only once, since it doesn’t really have any replayable value. Nevertheless, it’s definitely worth it.