Joe Jasko

Dream Chamber is a brand new point-and-click adventure game from Microids that's set in 1930s America, and gives players a highly stylized tale of item collecting and dialogue trees. The storyline itself is par for the course with engaging detective novel fare, and features a cartoony, almost-noir sense of presentation and progression. You play as Charlie Chamber, a wealthy-beyond-words man who's taken it upon himself to try his hand at being a private detective, much to the resistance of the actual private detectives in town. But when a highly publicized museum theft occurs at his girlfriend's latest charity event, Charlie will stop at nothing to make sure that he's the one on the case!It's a very nice setup, and the action moves along accordingly at a pretty fair pace, although most of the characters that populate the game world of Dream Chamber are decidedly unlikable, especially Charlie's vapid girlfriend and the creepy dream version of Charlie named Charles. However, the visuals and sound design more than make up for what Charlie and company might be lacking in the personality department. Everything in the game positively pops with bright and colorful illustrations, and a cool wavy visual effect really accentuates the many dream sequences, in addition to some serious top-notch voice-over talent. The actual gameplay is standard point-and-click adventure in every sense of the word; but the big twist here is that Charlie has the uncanny ability to revisit everywhere he's been in his own dreams, to get a deeper or longer look at some all-important evidence!"For instance, in one scene early on in the game, the inspector working the case accidentally drops a list of stolen items onto the floor of his office. Charlie, being the well-mannered gentleman that he is, quickly bends down to pick up the list and promptly gives it back to the impatient inspector, silently wishing he had more time to look over the items on the list in greater detail. When players return to the dream version of this scene a few short moments later, a glowing stolen objects list rests on the floor exactly where the inspector had dropped it in real life, allowing Charlie to scrutinize its contents now in the privacy of his own subconscious mind. It's certainly an interesting mechanic, and one that serves to accentuate all of the amateur private investigating that you'll be doing by day (NOTE: Just be sure to go into the menu and manually save your game at regular intervals, as Dream Chamber disappointingly does not seem to include any sort of auto-save feature).