Enypnion ReDreamed review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Surreal hand-drawn journey through the subconscious recurs in enhanced form

Dreams are a great mystery, and part of the most enigmatic organ we have: our brains. When I was in my late teens, I bought a book about lucid dreaming, and I was surprised to learn that it was actually possible: in my dreams, I could suddenly turn on the light in dark rooms, and jump over immense obstacles while being chased. The ability to shape dreams from within made for a great starting point for Sinking Sheep’s 2020 game Enypnion, which Dionous Games recently helped upgrade as Enypnion ReDreamed. This enhanced, reimagined version takes you as deep as possible into one person’s dream world, tickling your mind with both inventory and logic puzzles in the process. I never played the original game, but this remake promises “fresh new scenes,” “an improved story” and “a complete gameplay overhaul,” and the end result is definitely a short but sweet time, if not entirely a dream come true.

“Enypnion” is a Greek word basically meaning something you see in your sleep. More commonly: a dream. Young Jonathan is the protagonist of Enypnion ReDreamed, and one night a strange glowing orb visits him as he’s sleeping and enters his mind. Apparently he can’t wake up on his own; something is troubling him, and since dreams are known to reflect our real-life experiences, there’s a journey of redemption to be undertaken before he can break free. As the player, you have to take control of Jonathan within his own mind as he tries to manipulate his dreams to guide himself towards awakening.

The very first gameplay element is a choice. With Jonathan standing in the corner of a completely black screen, you’re presented with two options: do you keep silent, or do you ask the void where you are? Some newer narrative-driven games would add a timer, forcing you to make this decision in a matter of seconds. Not this one. Enypnion ReDreamed is a relaxed game, giving you the chance to completely absorb its world at your leisure. You’ll have to make a couple more choices throughout the game, but it turns out that they don’t matter at all, as the exact same scene will play out regardless of your decision. Except for the very last one, which will suddenly provide you with one of two possible endings.

So, no matter your reply, the glowing orb will appear again in the midst of this blackness and present itself as the dream spirit Ikelos, here to guide you through the dream world. It warns you of the dangers of your own subconscious playing tricks on you, but promises that ultimately you are the master of your dreams. There are no voice-overs, making the mysterious, spooky music almost a character of its own, mimicking sound effects like metal scraping and icy drops falling into a crystal lake, ethereal notes echoing around you as if you were in an underwater cave. As you progress, it’s all very reminiscent of the atmospheric music in The Dig, making you feel like you’re traveling through space – or in this case, some kind of otherworldly dimension.

A short tutorial following Ikelos’s introduction shows you the basics for interacting with the inventory, menus and the environment, before the game properly begins. I played using the mouse, but the game has full controller support as well. You’ll explore each location with the dream spirit functioning as your cursor. You get a description tag immediately as you hover over available hotspots, doing away with an “examine” button. A left-click interacts with hotspots, usually resulting in Ikelos commenting on it, and a right-click will try using the active inventory item with said hotspot. Once you pick up your first item, it automatically becomes active, but you can switch between other inventory items when your collection grows. After you’ve used a particular object, it vanishes from your inventory. Everything can only be used once, and you’ll start each new chapter with an empty inventory.

Dialogue is presented as comic book speech balloons. You can choose to let it advance automatically or not. Even on automatic mode, you can still manually advance to the next line once you’re done reading. The different text boxes are a bit confusing at first, though. Clicking away Ikelos’s comments about a hotspot interaction will replace the dialogue bubble with the original descriptive text box (assuming the cursor is still hovering over the same hotspot). Even though one is clearly a speech balloon with a tail and a white edge, and the latter just a regular rectangular text box, both have white lettering on a black background, and several times I confused the descriptive tag with one containing more information from Ikelos, often triggering comments a second time.

Enypnion ReDreamed has seven chapters, each consisting of only a couple of screens, so I was able to finish the story in three and a half hours. Once a section is completed, it becomes active in the chapter menu where you can choose to restart it, though there are no collectibles and no other apparent reason to go back other than the chance to replay a favorite section. There’s no manual save function, but the game saves automatically whenever you quit, and you can continue from where you left off.

Jonathan’s dream world is a night world, constantly dark, with many shades of blue. Most of the game takes place in a forest but a couple of times you’ll enter a castle. Just as our dreams are inspired by our own experiences, it seems Enypnion ReDreamed was influenced by some external sources as well, like Alice in Wonderland and The Hobbit. There’s an angry queen who likes to behead people, Jonathan drinks a potion that makes him shrink in one particular cinematic, and a cave-dwelling humanoid creature jumps around on all fours, falling just short of wailing for something precious.

Each background is designed in a hand-drawn style like the kind you find in children's bedtime stories, with little animations everywhere, like branches swaying in the wind, fog swirling above the ground, and dust motes catching the moonlight moving across your screen. Except for Jonathan, who always stands in a corner somewhere with his back turned to the player, almost like a simple observer watching you do the work for him. There’s one climbing animation for him, but otherwise you’ll never see him take a single step. Thankfully, you’re regularly rewarded with beautifully animated cutscenes when you make progress, which happens pretty often. These show Jonathan moving from one location to the next, usually with the help of other dream dwellers.

But the game isn’t only about weird imagery. There’s a story to be told as well – one of the subconscious processing troubling events from the waking world, about guilt and remorse, of making amends. Soon the fairy-tale-like environments make way for darker imagery, like a scary monster that could swallow you whole and carry you off, a mysterious Styx-like ferryman who requires payment, and a queen holding her own severed head in her hands. The game will keep you guessing what Jonathan actually did to inspire such symbolism, and kudos if you figure it out for yourself before being shown in the closing cutscene. Just don’t expect anything mind-blowing; Jonathan is still a little boy, and the finale is more reminiscent of a preachy life lesson in an eighties family sitcom episode – though depending on which choice you make at the end, it can get a bit darker.

Most of the puzzles in Enypnion ReDreamed are inventory-based, relying on the same procedure: spot an item out of reach in one screen, search for a tool in the next screen, retrieve the item with the tool in the first screen. Experienced gamers will move through these parts quite fast. Fortunately, logic puzzles are scattered throughout Jonathan’s dream too, as a manifestation of his subconscious trying to hide some awful truth from him. There’s a great variety to the locks, deadbolts and other mechanisms you encounter, with solutions involving levers, dials and tiles.

The solution to some logic puzzles were immediately apparent to me, while others I only vanquished through trial and error. Since I don’t have a very photographic memory, I soon resorted to making my own notes of symbols discovered in one location, the better to copy them at the next location. Once in a while, after five to ten minutes of trying, illumination suddenly hit me and I could finally work my way towards the solutions. The challenges get increasingly more difficult, and I must admit I solved some of them without really knowing how I did it. It’s not always easy to figure out what exactly the developers had in mind on occasion.

To give one example: at one point I had to find the right mushroom to make tea for a squirrel. It’s a dream, so naturally the mushrooms are alive, with different personalities, and the puzzle consists of changing their moods; the squirrel will only drink the “happy” tea, after all. I clicked randomly on the different mushrooms, trying to figure out the pattern of this puzzle so I could work my way towards the solution, only to suddenly find Ikelos telling me I already solved the riddle! Well, good for me I guess, but I still have no idea how I did that exactly.

Final Verdict

Dream worlds are ideal for adventure game craziness, because anything goes, so you shouldn’t be at all surprised to suddenly be confronted by a living crescent moon lounging with a book under a floor lamp. While I’m usually more a fan of realistic settings, Enypnion ReDreamed reminded me of a childhood filled with my own wildest dreams. The gameplay is quite easy overall, with casual inventory puzzles and fetch quests, but the occasional logic puzzle is so hard it’s sure to keep you occupied for a while, perhaps even frustratingly so. But then you’ll solve it, and be rewarded with another beautiful cinematic that inspires you to push on to the end. It’s a short game even with these few head-scratchers, but it really doesn’t need to be longer, because there’s only so far you can stretch out a story in which you move from one location to the next without really knowing what exactly is going on. Nevertheless, there’s a fun and charming world to explore for a few hours, and the whole experience really does pass by like a relaxing dream sequence, even if it too will likely soon fade from memory.

Johnny played Enypnion ReDreamed on PC using a review code provided by the game’s publisher.

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