Daydream: Forgotten Sorrow review – Not a lot of dream, plenty of sorrow

Platformers are great games and the more simple titles from the last decades can work as great entries for new players who’ve never tried many before. However, this also means that new entries have a lot to live up to, and when they don’t, they get lampooned. The most extreme example of this in recent memory is the recently released The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, and it deserves it too.

Every new platform game just has to not be Gollum if it wants to reach the bare minimum, which would make it disappointing if you noticed similar errors. Thankfully, Daydream: Forgotten Sorrow doesn’t quite reach that level of pure disappointment, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t extremely frustrated in the time that I was able to put up with this title.

While there are beautiful cinematics and detailed environments, the overall gameplay was a chore and lacked the safeguards that would normally make a game approachable. This seems to have been done in a way that’s not due to any bugs but an actual lack of forethought in certain mechanics.

Not much of a platform to stand on

One of the more important aspects of platformers is how it approaches climbing and puzzle mechanics, with the ease of use in those often being the deciding factor in whether a game is fun or not. Games like Limbo, which this title ever-so-slightly reminds me of, do really well with the simplicity of the world while still taking full advantage and telling a compelling story.

That’s not apparent in Daydream: Forgotten Sadness in the hours I played, with most areas feeling like one brief exploration of a concept before abandoning it for the next. The game can’t take more than 10 hours to beat and mostly I got the vibe that the protagonist is going through some neglect at home and has had to rely on his favorite teddy bear for companionship, like in the movie Ted.

There were other moments that seemed to be plucked from other games that I’m choosing to be respectful of when I call them an homage. Remember when Scarecrow attacks you in Arkham Asylum and you have to hide from a 100 ft version while he scans an area for you? That but if you were running the opposite direction is basically one of the early mini-games and it never really evolves on it or lasts as long as the Batman game did.

Whereas most games at least try to create some kind of story as a vehicle for the mechanics, I had a really hard time understanding what Daydream was trying to tell me, but that could be on me. Most of the puzzles were really easy, but there were also moments where there was something completely unrelated, like pushing a box, that wasn’t part of the objective but I spent 10 minutes distracted anyway. In that way, the simplicity and lack of any real UI made it more of a hindrance than a feature.

Little Nightmares meets its natural opposite

Something that Daydream: Forgotten Sorrow does well that I’ve not seen in similar side-scrolling platformers is the ability to transition so well from light imagination to dark. It adds to the sort of dream-like ethereal state of the world, with there being threats like giant robotic hands coming after you in certain parts of the game, taking your teddy bear companion away sometimes too.

I point out the removal of your pal in some sequences because it didn’t make any sense the first time it happened and I kind of kept waiting for it to reappear or introduce a new mechanic. Instead, it just seems like the friend you’d relied on up to that point kinda just ditched you until he decided to come back at exactly the right moment, but maybe that was intended.

One of the more frustrating stretches of the game, and ultimately what led me to give it up, involved running down a single hallway avoiding crumbling walls and falling pillars. However, the damaged area of these objects isn’t clear, so my character would often just crumble after some invisible object collided with them. There’s also one very specific part where you have to jump from a table to a platform that’s at like a 60 to a 65-degree angle where you have to land within inches of a certain area.

That might not be so bad except for Daydream also has a pretty big issue with barriers, causing my character to fall off the edge of platforms or glitch through walls that seemed solid. The number of times I fell off the edge of something and just sighed because of an ill-defined barrier that I had to go near is more than I care to remember.

For a game with such a cute teddy bear mascot, it just doesn’t hit the mark for me. It feels like it’s borrowing a lot of mechanics from other games and never really did anything that made it stand out in my eyes. Hopefully, others who are willing to try it out will have a more enjoyable experience.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website!