Every single person born into this world enters into a contract of crushing sadness. In a healthy family, you will love your parent or parents, and they will love you, and your lives together will be full of joys, discoveries, disappointments, despair, wonder and horror. You’ll seek some out solo, but quite a bit you will hopefully share. Yet the contract requires one of you to leave before the other, and it’s a guarantee that reaches outside the bounds of fairness or justice. Statistically, parents will depart before their children, and, no matter the age, it hurts and changes your life indelibly. But for some truly unlucky people, the contract terminates early, and you are robbed of all the potential that you were promised, leaving you with only pain. As I Began to Dream gives weight and dimensions to this awful truth in a unique, if clunky, manner.

As you can tell, this will be a fun read, so grab some snacks!

Lily is a young girl who fills her days with fancy and peace. Her mother and father make time one day to go on a walk together and enjoy the world as a family. Lily is simply trying to enjoy a nice day out with her parents when an errant breeze flings her hat into a meadow. When Lily chases after it and turns around, something dark and sinister has consumed her parents, leaving her alone and lost. Though Lily shortly is given aid by her stuffed turtle that has inexplicably begun to talk, Lily’s forward movement to find out what has happened and where her parents are is a solo endeavor. She will get assistance and helpful pointers from others, though not without a price. Some need help themselves, and Lily is only too happy to help. But acceptance as to what has truly happened…that is Lily’s personal journey.

As Lily moves forward, she finds the way is not as easy as it may seem. As I Began to Dream is a puzzle adventure, with each area broken into multiple rooms where you need to manipulate the environment in order to move forward. There’s a gaming aspect of finding and collecting hidden/difficult to reach bonus orbs, presumably to unlock an additional ending or simply just to enjoy the experience (I was not able to get them all, so I cannot confirm one way or another). The interesting aspect is that Lily solves these rooms through a sort of psychic power that can only manifest if you’re standing in front of specific blue markers. Once here, Lily can rotate squares of the screen or swap them around, crafting a clever (if complicated) path for a little girl who otherwise may not be able to reach.

This very simply, early puzzle gives a clear idea of what Lily is expected to do for 80% of the game.

The interactions of the game through the movement are a damning aspect of what makes this game a bit frustrating. The puzzles themselves seem to be solid and are good points of thinking and consideration. With MotionRec, I was able to find the right set of movements and actions through intuition as well as trial and error that felt fun and fluid. You could make a mistake and quickly course correct so that even steps in the wrong direction were still forward. For As I Began to Dream, there seems to be only one correct solution, which involves needing to totally reset and starting over again, which makes multi-room puzzles a bit of a headache if you make an error. While I appreciate that the solutions are sometimes clean cut and obvious, it still slows down the momentum when you continually need to take it back to one.

Additionally, the physics are a little willy nilly, which can lead to mistakes you didn’t know you could make. For example, Lily sometimes needs to unlock a door through a glowing orb that she must pick up and bring to the spot, but cannot jump when she’s holding said orb. So you have to throw it a very short distance (as Lily is a young child) and hope that this isn’t the day momentum decides to play against you, or that the orb doesn’t clip into a wall and remain there indefinitely. Both of these instances happened to me within a couple of rooms, and they weren’t isolated incidents. As much as I appreciate games trying to take a “real world” approach and remembering Newtonian laws, the timing on reminding the player about objects at rest and all that jazz feels quite inopportune.

This isn’t a metaphor moment, I just misjudged the controls and now I’m stuck.

Having said that, I also quite like the puzzles of As I Began to Dream because they’re ones that you can mull over in your head apart from the game. Since the rules are always very clear for each world on what you can and cannot do, this is a game where taking a breather isn’t just for your sanity, but also to help you arrive upon a solution without the ongoing pressure of playing the game. It’s been a long time since I’ve solved a game’s quandary while being totally separated from the experience, but that happened to me with a particularly fiendish sequence whose solution exploded from my mind in the middle of dinner some hours later. It’s the kind of moment that makes the game feel logical and sensible and makes the player feel like a damn genius.

Each world of As I Began to Dream seems to capture a level of DABDA, for those familiar with the acronym. For example, there’s an inherent degree of whimsy in the first zone, where Lily explores a mythical feeling civilization and plumbs the depths of pyramid-like structures. In another, Lily’s powers disappear, leaving her to try and power her way through a crushing corporate-adjacent world. The meaning behind each world and how it applies to the stages of grief are far from subtle, but they also aren’t so on the nose that you are being spoonfed the deeper meaning. It’s a good touch that compliments the overarching and important evolution of Lily throughout this quest, which inherently will not end well, but at least will bring closure, whatever that means for you or someone like you.

Whihc of the five stages is this one? Guess correctly and sob uncontrollably!

In fact, a lot of the inherent misgivings I had about the art style – it being quite rough and childlike – seems more and more intentional the further you play. As I Began to Dream is not necessarily about the tale that a child has to tell: it’s one that an adult may share through the lens of a child. No matter how old you become, no matter how far you travel, the moment where a memory is created is crystalline, and cannot be altered. While we may forget or confuse things, the core facts are set in stone, and Lily’s experience, from dark and mysterious entities to a flying, talking turtle are entirely valid and what she remembers, what she saw. Her pain and trauma is not lessened because it happens to have a watercolor, dreamy effect: you feel what you feel, and that’s all there is.

As expected, the soundtrack does a solid job of conveying emotion, but it’s not always as on-the-nose as you might expect. Some of the melancholy notes are also shot through with really driving adventurous tones, from the peaceful ambience of the caverns to the curious flow of the soundtrack around the seaside area. I particularly liked the bombastic beginning of the industrial zone, where the work and the pain that you put in may drain your life force, but has to account for something. While there are no voices that occur, it’s better that way: let the sounds and the feeling do the speaking for the game instead of having everything spoonfed.

If I can put this back together, I can put other things back together…right?

As I Began to Dream is a lovely, if bittersweet, experience that delivers in the storytelling department, but fumbles a bit in the gameplay execution. Some puzzles are difficult, not by design, but by technical missteps. The music is spot on, the collecting aspect adds some challenge and replay, and Lily is a wonderful protagonist whom I feel very sorry for. This is not a long game, but it is a memorable game, and that’s all we can hope for. After all, this is just a dream, a way for Lily to try and find peace and make sense of a horrible, horrible world. When Lily awakens, life will still be a complex misasma of joy and suffering, but, hopefully, she has found a way to move forward. As, inevitably, we all must do.

As I Began to Dream is available now on Steam, Epic Game Store and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of As I Began to Dream was provided by the publisher.