Dreams Chronicles is an interactive seek-and-search puzzle game that focuses on a mortal woman named Faye, who awakens from a sleep spell that her town of Wish was placed under by the Fairy Queen of Dreams, Lilith. Lilith kidnaps Faye's husband, Fidget, who is a fairy and also is the one responsible for awakening Faye from her slumber. Leaving a path for Faye to follow in her diary, Fidget makes sure that Faye can save him and the town as Lilith believe that she can gain the ability to control the mortals' dreams. You'll need to solve a variety of puzzles to continue through your journey, such as finding objects around the screen for building a wagon or reconstructing a rope bridge and even a very tedious piano puzzle that challenges your musical skills and ability to pay attention to detail. Sound interesting? Read more for my full review on Dreams Chronicles.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I first started playing Dreams Chronicles. I felt that it had an interesting story to tell and fairly decent look about it. As I mentioned in my introduction, the story follows a mortal named Faye. Her husband is kidnapped by the Fairy Queen of Dreams and puts the town into a sleep. Lilith believes she needs Fidget in order to control the dreams of the mortals. Throughout the story, you'll unlock many secrets about Faye's family that not even she had known, like how her entire in-law family have a long line of fairies within their heritage.

Aside from the three main characters within Dreams Chronicles that I have already mentioned, there are another set of three that make their way into the story as well. Lyra, who is Faye and Fidget's daughter, is another who had fallen under the deep sleep like the rest of the village of Wish. She isn't mentioned in great detail other than having to solve a puzzle in her bedroom and another puzzle in her treehouse. Fidget's parents, Aeval and Tangle, are the two other characters within the story, although we never get a chance to see them. Aeval is the Fairy Queen of Flora and can communicate with planets and Fidget's father, Tangle is the King of Knowledge.

Throughout Dreams Chronicles, the puzzles and riddles you'll solve become more difficult as you progress. You will find objects within the room by moving the cursor within the screen. Don't worry, you'll get many clues on the way but sometimes these clues aren't really enough to get to the next puzzle. Some of the puzzles are ones that you really do need to think about, but once you realize how to solve that puzzle, it will become more easier to you and you'll fly through the game faster than you hoped. I noticed one of the achievements within the game was to beat it within 30 minutes, as well as another challenge for beating it in within 25 minutes. This is definitely something that will take time, patience and overall memory to be able to achieve in that time frame. Especially since the first time through this it may take a few hours. But, the replay value is still there, if you are a casual gamer.

With 18 scenes to travel through, Dreams Chronicles is fairly short, but with the ranging difficulty levels with a few of the puzzles, it can become quite tedious and rather slow.

With only one major side quest to achieve throughout the game; collecting dream pieces, small gems that go to your dream jewels collection, can become a rather difficult search to find them all. Some you'll see by a shining glimmer on screen and others you may skip over completely as they blend quite well within the background. The more dream pieces you gather, the higher your score will be by the end of your quest too. So, it's a nice reward to collect them during your travels. For every dream piece that is collected by Faye, you'll receive 1,000 points to your score. There are 115 dreams pieces in all that combine into 8 dream jewels.

There are a few ways for you to obtain points throughout Dream Chronicles, depending on how fast you solve the puzzles and the more dream pieces you collect. Through time, you'll be able to move faster within each puzzle and obtain a higher score, hopefully snagging the completion in 25 minutes. This is where the whole replay factor comes into play... Also, when replaying the game, you may find that many of the objects have changed location in order to add some extra difficulty along the way.

Dreams Chronicles is an artistic game. Created in a storyboard form, the cut-scenes show off the outside environment a little more in detail and tells the story of Faye's journey to find her husband and awaken the village of Wish.

A cool feature that I thought was good about Dreams Chronicles is that you can play co-op if you are in need of some extra help from a friend. Though honestly, you may not need it as most of the puzzles are easily obtainable with only one player.

Overall, I felt that Dreams Chronicles had an interesting story and it was a decent casual game, but it wasn't anything to really rush out and go get. There is definitely replay value here, but with how short it is, it just kind of sits in the mediocre area.

* Title: Dreams Chronicles

* Developer: KatGames

* Publisher: PlayFirst

* Release Date: Available Now

* MSRP: 800 Microsoft Points ($10)

* Review copy info: A digital download code of this title was provided to DualShockers, Inc. by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

Dream Chronicles
5.5 / 10