Lucy Dreaming Review (Switch)

While many genres from the old world of gaming have found new form with indie developers, the point and click adventure has, for the most part, been conspicuous by its absence. There have been a few of course, the recent(ish) Monkey Island game and Broken Sword 5, (and the re-release of the original) spring to mind. But, for the most part it is an often-unexplored genre in modern times. Lucy Dreaming is a valiant attempt at trying to change that.

Lucy Dreaming, developed by Tall Story games is a British point and click adventure with the ‘British’ aspect of it very much at its core, at least in terms of the accents and voices. Lucy and her family have crazy accents so thick you’d think they were coming to you straight from a Dickensian novel. Aside from that though there isn’t much else to this tag. The game is heavily influenced in terms of style by the Lucas Arts point and click adventure games, most notably the 8-bit ones such as Maniac Mansion which the game takes its graphical style from. There are of course multiple Easter eggs placed around to point this out as well.

The game follows the tried and tested route of point and click games. You move Lucy around using and on-screen cursor. Then you can look at, use, or pick up objects. Objects can then be used to solve puzzles allowing you to progress. In timed honoured fashion, a fair few of these puzzles require the most lateral of thinking to achieve. Telling jokes to a piranha plant so it laughs and spits out a key is a prime example of this. Some of the puzzles are a touch too obscure though, and you can descend into wandering around using every object on everything else until something clicks which isn’t ideal.

The main premise of the game is that Lucy is having strange dreams. This allows the developers to give us two distinct worlds to move between. There’s the dream world of course where things are much more surreal and stranger and the waking world where Lucy can explore her house and neighbourhood to gather items that will eventually allow the poor girl to get a good night’s sleep.

For the most part the writing and humour is good. The characters Lucy encounters are just the right side of zany to be amusing without descending into it being too on the nose. Lucy herself has enough sharp responsive to things to make sure you are unlikely to get bored clicking on things as well.

Controls wise it’s always difficult to move mouse-based games onto consoles, but the Switch version handles quite well. The analogue stick isn’t completely ideal, but it just about holds up. There is also the option to go touch screen but then you’ll be covering your screen in more smudges than you can possibly imagine. The streamlined commands keep things logical and although it invades the view screen, having your inventory and other information available at all times is incredibly useful. There aren’t that many concessions for players who may struggle though.

Many of these games now have hint systems but all you’ll get from Lucy Dreaming is a button that highlights interactive objects in the room. This is of course essential on the Switch when in handheld mode, but it’s not going to help if there’s a puzzle you just can’t get your head around for a few hours. Lucy does give decent hints as well, but we certainly found ourselves stuck on a few occasions for far longer than was comfortable.

Overall, Lucy dreaming is mostly successful in trying to bring an old school style point and click adventure to a modern audience. Long term fans of the genre will get on well with it and will likely not be as phased by the occasionally obscure puzzles. Newcomers though would be better served starting with something a little more up to date in terms of mechanics. One thing we can say though, is that this would fit neatly into the output when point and click games ruled the gaming world, and that alone should be applauded.

Overall 7/10