Weird Dreams

I've been around a while. Weird Dreams was a game I originally played on my Amiga from floppies. I enjoyed it so much I later bought it again when the IBM came out. The graphics aren't very hi res when compared to today's games, but they managed to show some impressive surrealistic scenes with unusual challenges. Remarkably, it manages to be engrossing without being the slightest bit erotic. That's not necessarily a plus for me, but it is violent in a kind of comic way.

You play a man with a messed up brain walking around a dreamscape in his pajamas. More like a nightmare than a dream, the settings although sometimes as common as a circus midway are infused with irrational gimmicks and become strange and threatening. Early on you cross a desert bapping mutant monsters with a fish. A nice touch I found is that if you try to walk back to the first screen by going left, you find yourself wandering through endless desert! It's a cross between Monty Python and a frontal lobotomy. You do have to think and find solutions to each challenge. The plot is difficult enough to make the gameplay last more than a single night if you don't read a walkthrough. Imagine having to pass a garden of snapping roses with Teddy Roosevelt choppers only to confront a homicidal little girl, or dodging a wasp the size of an elephant. A very wacky game in a dark sort of way but unique enough to retain appeal.
I really like games with surreal and strange gimmicks, like The Devil inside where the male character has an alter ego if a demonic devil woman or Omikron, where you switch from body to body, but maybe that’s just me. Bizarre games like Weird Dreams come out so infrequently I have to play them over again and again.
The graphics weren't noticeably different in the port from the Amiga to the IBM. Someone put a lot of thought into this. Originally it came with a sizeable booklet with a story that read something like Doug Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy. Most impressive was the ability to create a genuinely dreamlike atmosphere, at times like something from Lewis Carrol. I confess I had to find a walkthrough to finish it, but that could have been because I was too thick, never from impatience. I think the concept of creating an action adventure game like this at the time was brilliant. Don't waste your time trying to find Freudian symbols. It’s all in fun.