It's that time again I come here and tell you this is a beautiful game.
You might start to assume I will praise any game I play but that's not
true. What happens is I play through several VNs before committing to
one. I would have played maybe 10 to 20 min of 4 or 5 titles before
finding one I feel like reading all the way to the end and of course
I'll review only those that I actually read all the way through. This is
the latest one, Happy Dream Syndrome. This is the type of game that
makes me wonder why nobody played it and most importantly, why there are
so many boring plots for anime each season when they have stories like
this lying around the internet. I don't get it. The other 4 guys who
played this on yt all loved it and it's 5 stars on novelgame.
The art for this is pretty good. It has its own style going for it
and it makes the characters very memorable. It doesn't look like a VN
backed by a professional studio of course, but it is still pretty good
and it has more charm and strength than a lot of generic 'highly
professional' illustrations I see out there on VNs. The music is
composed of 3 piano medleys. Not the best but they really work for this
game. I had some problems with the gameplay though. Game has a couple of
bugs and at least for me it's broken on Firefox. About 2 hours in
there's a small animation scene and it doesn't matter what I try, I
can't make the clip to load and run on firefox. Had to switch to Chrome
and redo a huge portion of the game to get where I was. About 15 minutes
of skipping. Free games though, you can't really complain. Lots of
routes to take here. In fact I ended up cheating and looking up how to
get one of the endings, then I regretted doing it because it was really
obvious and the only thing I hadn't tried, despite being obvious.
The story begins with a trope I really like and I think everyone who
played a lot of rpgmaker games back in its heyday have a soft spot for
it as well. The protagonist wakes up with no idea who he is or where
he's at. He lost all memory of his past and it's on the same level of
wisdom about the world he's in as we the players starting this game for
the first time. Protagonist memory loss must be the single most popular
trope for RPG Maker games for the first decade of the 2000s for sure and
here we have it, too.
This guy wakes up in a hospital bed full of bruises everywhere. He
has no idea what happened. Hospital seems empty so he decides to wander
around until finding a nurse sleeping in another room. She explains he
was found in the woods nearby and this is a psychiatric sort of
hospital. Sort of, because this takes a lot of turns. As you interact
with the other patients, things begin to make less sense until it
begins to make more sense and then it becomes a matter of who to trust
and the it goes all over the place. It's really good. This game also
introduced me to something I really like but didn't know until now and
that is female characters too old to care for stuffed animals but still
have a strong attachment to them for some tragic reason. It hits some
really specific commiseration trigger in my brain, hard to explain.
I guess I'll try to give you a not nearly complete run of the whole
mystery, in a single paragraph. Spoilers, don't read this if you plan to
play this game for yourself.
Toi-kun
wakes up in a hospital with memory loss. He wanders around, and finds
the hospital only has 3 patients. Asahi, Aki and Leo, a nurse named Meru
and a doctor named... Doctor. They're all really, REALLY damaged people
mentally though of course you don't know this from the start. Asahi is
the first patient you meet and 'solve'. She lost her one and only
friend, a stuffed animal toy shark named Garo. I won't go through all
her story but basically her problem is she's a complete anti-social
individual incapable of being close to anyone but her toy Garo. You find
the toy on the same day she's leaving the hospital. You part ways
promising to be friends. She lets go of Garo before leaving, which is
very weird, it's almost like she is brainwashed. Then you meet another
damaged patient, Aki. Aki is only there for the money as he's taking
part in the happy pill experiment... but not really, he's just a
'regularly' super damaged person and is coping by pretending he's there
by his own volition. I won't go through his story but it involves being
poor and having to work from a very young age to support his siblings,
tragic stuff. He also ends up being released. Lastly you have Leo, a
really nice guy you find in the library. He seems very smart and calm
but in reality he has bouts of violent behavior and ends up killing a
cat close to the mid-end of the game to great dramatic effect. All these
people suspect each other and the actual goals of the treatment they're
receiving, and they also suspect the medical staff, and are
investigating the hospital by snooping around, so you get caught up not
knowing who to trust or not to trust. On top of all this, you're trying
to figure it out what is going on with your memory and trying to make
sense of what happened and who you're and the staff doesn't seem to care
or be able to help. The choices available to you reflect this and it
makes for very interesting unraveling. I'm skipping hours of dialogue,
but the whole thing makes for a great mystery. Leo's story is one of
domestic violence. He and his sister ran away from home but he soon
realizes he's just as violent and dangerous as his dad and several
things leads him to end up in this hospital. So when you go through all
these stories and several flashbacks that you end up connecting by the
end, you get to go outside (you were forbidden to do so) and the truth
is revealed. As far as your memory wipe, the fact is you killed your
mother during one of her psychotic episodes. She is obsessed with her
son and won't allow him to do anything because she's afraid he'll leave
her too, just like dad did. It's a really sick relationship that ends up
with Toi stabbing her in the stomach. Then through some more
shenanigans you end up in the hospital that turns out it's not a
hospital at all. This is actually a religious cult funded on some weird
idea about a God that grants hypnotic powers to a chosen few. These
powers are real but it's really hard to find the right people that can
open the third eye, so they're basically kidnapping youngsters to test
their potential. This is all a secret of course, so they basically have
to dispose of everyone who doesn't make it, which means all the other
patients you met are probably dead. If you make all the right choices
and manage to survive all this crazy rodeo, you find out Meru is
conducting all these under orders and she has those hypnotic power
herself. You convince her she can leave all this behind and come with
you. The end. Also Doctor gets hit at the back of the head and is
probably left to bleed to death in the woods. There are really no happy
endings here, this is all really tragic but it's also really good and you should play it if you can.
https://novelgame.jp/games/show/4922?fes=1
You can watch someone else playing it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvPXLuwG5UM&list=PL0DEAPIYMmKG1396U8wJU4C06Dnby0yFo
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