Xbox Indie Review: A Killer’s Dream

There are varying opinions on how much of a game needs to be played before a competent review can be written.  Is a reviewer obligated to play every potentially grueling hour of an RPG before formulating an opinion?   Does he/she owe it to the game to see it through to the end?  Would a film critic walk out after half a movie and write a review?

Thankfully, such a quandary doesn’t exist for A Killer’s Dream, because it can be finished in less than five minutes.

I was actually a bit intrigued by the game’s premise: you play the role of a psychic detective who can go inside the dreams of homicidal maniacs to try and determine their identities.  If handled correctly, the concept could be fleshed into an innovative game involving interesting characters, puzzles mixing real-world and dream clues and a strong narrative.  A Killer’s Dream incorporates none of these elements and is a thankfully brief one-trick pony, which squanders a potentially great idea.

There is no explanation about how the killer is doing anything, why he’s doing it, what he’s done, or why such drastic measures are being resorted to in order to bring him to justice.  Some type of investigation or semblance of a story would have really added to the experience.  The brief story is revealed by your partner and is essentially just an explanation about how the game works.  You are a nameless clairvoyant who falls asleep and sees clues about the killer.

The dreams are nothing but photographs scrolling across a cloudy screen with minimalistic, allegedly-creepy music playing.  Many of the photos are women posing in glamorous positions and feel like they were cut out of a catalogue.  They are completely irrelevant to the game and serve no purpose other than as an excuse to incorporate pictures of attractive women looking insightful or slightly sensual.  Are these the nameless victims?  What kind of person’s dreams consist of still images, eerie music and an abundance of fog?

Periodically during the sequences, a picture will flash on screen containing a letter or cryptic symbol to help identify the killer.  The pictures stay on screen for less than a second, so try not to sleep through the 98% of the game that is utterly meaningless or else you might miss them.  Don’t worry if you do though because if you don’t have enough letters to guess the suspect from a list of names at the end, you can just enter another dream.

If you’re feeling confident in your snooze-gumshoeing skills or more likely just want to get the game over with, you can take a stab at the killer.  If you guess incorrectly, the game ends and you return to the title screen.  If you manage to identify that deranged maniac, congratulations, you rock.  Game over.  There is no reward, no story, not even a second mission.

A Killer’s Dream takes an interesting concept for a game and completely phones it in.  It feels incomplete or at the very least, very, very rushed.  Either way, the game is so short and not even remotely entertaining despite its promising premise.

Visit the Xbox Live Marketplace to add a free demo of A Killer’s Dream to your Xbox 360 download queue.

A Killer’s Dream was provided for review by Silver Dollar Games.  It is available for 80 MS Points ($1).

By Mike Wall at May 10, 2010.

About Mike Wall

Mike grew up and lives near Philadelphia and has been intrigued with games ever since his parents preached that they rotted his brain. He studied journalism at Penn State and got his master's degree in secondary education before realizing that not even summers off would make that job palatable. He now works in marketing and is trying to find time to continue writing a book about zombies, aliens, vampires, the end of the world, and a talking cat.