SRB Dream Emulator v1

This review will be split into 4 sections, 1 for each reviewer and a conclusion. I’m not good with openings so let’s just jump into it.

== AVERYS’S BIT ==
Hi, funny robot man here, I’m just gonna start from Day 1 and work my way down.

There is little to no direction on what to actually do every map, and you’re kinda just stuck walking aimlessly trying to find a way to progress. We spent around 20 minutes wandering around Day 1, which is a very short space until I noticed there was a orange spot on the floor which revealed the door, then we spent another 10 minutes trying to find what we had to do after that until finally coming across the bedroom. Mind you, the game crashed around twice during this entire period and we had to restart EVERYTHING which was really annoying.

Day 2 had a much larger map, the design was pretty neat and the little details like posters n’ stuff was cool, as well as that it nails the whole dreamy/nostalgic feeling pretty well but that’s pretty much the only positive.

Much like Day 1, you couldn’t progress until finding some obscure spot on the floor which takes you to another area, the sewers. We went up to the sewers which crashed our game AGAIN (FUN.) After this we spent ANOTHER 25 MINUTES in the castle trying to figure out what buttons to push as THERE ARE 0 INDICATORS, AGAIN. It was just running against wall and dying to that fuckin’ fan for what felt like an eternity. We were stuck for even longer until L-Bot (god bless that man) found a button in the sewers, and after a very VERY long time of trying to hit it we eventually got it and opened the door which ended it.

Case and point: This map was just a bigger version of Day 1, which is not a good start to begin with, because we were just head-banging our heads against the walls until we finally found a way to get past. This is just BEGGING me to use a walkthrough because god bless anyone who does this normally.

Day 3 was.. Something. The aesthetics were neat aside from the fact the game ran at a good 5 FRAMES PER SECOND. Now I have no clue whether this was Neon (the server host)’s computer being shit or the map just having too many particles. The parts where you get teleported to different bits of the dream was neat ig, the art was actually really cool though, props to whoever did it. Not much else to say aside from that, endings were boring and everything else was pretty meh.

That’s about it from me, here’s Neon:


== HEY GUYS :]]]] WELCOME TO THE NEW SERIES ON NEON TV CALLED: “this mappack fucking sucks”!!!! ==

so day 1. i sigsev'ed the game in the first 4 minutes. we’re off to a great start folks!! while we were walking around the house all we found were locked doors, and a hallway that leads to nothing. until Avery found out about some fucking orange block then, we have a fucking seizure and leave day 1 :|

while this whole “theme” thing was cool, eerie n shit. it just felt like I had no idea what to do and when something happens it’s just a cutscene. day 2. fucking aids. the crashes were WAY MORE FREQUENT THERE. ladder to the building? sigsev. Waltz up to the laptop at the top? sigsev. ENTER ANY ROOM? MOTHERFUCKING SIGSEV. I do like the map design but man, too many crashes.
day 3. I seduced a tree and it spawned Garfield. Also there was some shadow man, and I came back to the day 1 house. which made me paralyzed from the waist down, which results in the Sleep Paralysis ending :] this entire shithole also tampered with my settings. not cool.

Anyways here’s a special guest that i totally wasn’t holding at gunpoint: LuigiBot (more commonly known as L-Bot) ;]]]



== THE COOL GUEST SECTION ==

Hello whoever reads this, this is L-Bot, today’s guest reviewer! I’ll be going over Day 3’s experience, from my perspective… Ok, not really. The level felt like I was on drugs, compared to day 1 and 2. Instead, I’ll talk about the issues in multiplayer, as well as the ending stuff.

First off, once someone progresses, the others are locked out unless they do it all at once. This goes for the endings, as well. Avery entered the “Inner Peace” ending, locking Me and Neon out. Oh yeah, the endings. They make ZERO SENSE! There’s no explanation or anything, it just kinda happens and that’s it.

Second of all, Multiplayer crashed a lot, and made this experience generally unfun to play with, whether that be going up a ladder or entering a room at the wrong time, it just made the experience worse for me atleast.

(l-bot left mid review so thats all he said)

== CONCLUSION ==

Overall, the art/aesthetics were pretty neat, but gameplay wise this was just a labyrinth of misdirection and confusion, there’s 0 indicators on where or what to do and players can just be left wandering aimlessly without any direction or objective.

This map is also very clearly not built for multiplayer, at least for us, with the constant crashes from not only the host (Neon) but also me and L-bot too. Not to mention it fucks your settings up which isn’t very awesome. It's also WAY too cryptic, that needs a bit of work.

Overall, we rate 2/5.

NEON’S NOTE: overall: headbang the walls to win

got through the mod halfway but stopped and never finished it because I'm actually afraid this game will jumoscare me, still good tho

I would like there to be more maps or rather more days because it is very short it is better that they make the mod longer because otherwise it is very boring :(

the doors on day two where your in the building. when you touch them they dont open the metal door

I think the idea is good (certainly the most eyecatching map on the Addons page, not to mention I'm a big LSD fan) but it's way too cryptic. I spent maybe 15 minutes in Map 1 rubbing my face against every wall trying to figure out how to progress, and I'm stuck on Map 2 as of writing this, already having rubbed my face against every wall in the parking lot and currently doing so with the outside area. This map would _massively_ benefit from a hints system or less obtuse "touch this and MAYBE you can progress" type progression, it reminds me a lot of Clock Tower: Ghost Head in that regard, (the three ghosts in the second level in that game come to mind)

It's fun that it's so different, but kinda annoying to find the secret stuff

This mod is weird but its good :)

Somehow managed to beat this with the "good" ending, that was a trip.
Anyways, amazing level pack! Would definitely go back to it at some point.

that was a weird game

I really liked this map pack! Not only is this one of the most unique set of maps I've seen in a while, but it's also very inspirational for people who want to make SRB2 Horror maps. The only problem? It's very unclear. As of writing this there is no way to tell in-game where you are supposed to go. It's just "touch everything you possibly can to progress". And while the OG PS1 Dream Emulator was like this, that doesn't mean that this map pack could improve on it. But, at the end of the day, I still like this, and I'm craving for more.

This was a great experience, loved how weird and freaky everything was!
Although, most of the time of me playing was running around not knowing what I'm doing, and finding out I can somehow get myself killed in certain spots by being dumb.
Especially in Day 2, I found out about that switch underwater pretty quickly, but I thought "Oh, this is quite hard get to, unlike the other ways to progress, so it can't be one of those trigger things."

Reminds me of the time there was another horror map someone was hosting on the Master Server, which I also liked a lot, so you did nice on this, I hope to see more!

Best SRB2 horror experience I've dealt with in a while. Which is a sentence I never thought I'd type let alone experience through.

I'm a big scaredy cat when it comes to horror and this definitely made me quiver in my chair. Just like the original Dream Emulator, it's an abstract puzzle game where the solutions are pretty simple once you know what you're doing, but without randomization that makes it frustrating to exprience.

What IS frustrating, however, is Day 2's first puzzle. For example, there's absolutely nothing to do in the underground. It's just empty space, and a big one that most players will think is the right way to go. The actual way is incredibly easy to miss and not obvious at first glance, much like Day 1's hidden door. I'd really consider making it at least a little easier to see, it took me over an hour to find it and I had people explicitly tell me where to go.

Day 3 had my mood constantly shift from "oh god im going to die" to "where the hell is the next trigger" - but it's smaller scale made finding the triggers a little easier by making educated guesses.

In the end, I got both endings just to see everything this had to offer. I congratulate you on a great horror/suspense mod. And thank you for making the scares surreal and suspenseful rather than loud and obnoxious jumpscares with SPOOKY hyper realistic blood.

I had to give up at day 2 because I couldn't figure out where to go. What I played of this map pack was nice though.

This map was... weird and amazing at the same time. Though I needed some help to get through these levels (there should be a hint system for if you are lost), those were incredibly fun to explore and play. I think there can be some improvements too since the level pack crashes and Fang can't complete it but it's pretty solid.

Well, finally I was able to pass this but I got negative impressions. Almost all gameplay boils down to "Run all over the map, hoping to find something". I was also upset that this level pack does not work if you are playing for Fang.
Perhaps, without these drawbacks, this pack would be quite interesting. You've written a lot of scripts. It is commendable.

Welcome to releases. This was a trip going through the maps although in some parts it took awhile to figure out what to do in order to progress through them.