D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die -Season One-

I went in knowing Swery's reputation and still wasn't ready. D4 drops you into the skin of David Young, a bubble-gum-chewing, hockey-obsessed private investigator who can time-travel by touching objects his dead wife left behind. Those objects are called mementos, and the mechanic is genuinely lovely in concept: you can't dive into the past whenever you like, only when the right relic surfaces, which gives each time-slip a weight that a free-travel system would dissolve. The story unfolds mostly on an airplane and in David's apartment, and the cast of characters you meet there, including a fashion designer who believes his mannequin is a living person and a paranoid passenger convinced that every mundane detail is an omen of her death, is dense with the kind of hand-crafted oddness that only one specific creative brain could produce. The interaction model is closer to a point-and-click adventure than anything else, though calling it that risks implying puzzles that aren't really there. You click to move David to pre-determined spots, rotate his field of view, grab or push objects, and trigger quick-time sequences that judge your timing with a Synchro Score system, awarding a percentage rating you can compare against other players. A Vision mode, draining its own meter, highlights interactive objects in the environment. There is also a Stamina meter that depletes as you investigate, eat food you find or buy from a mysterious white cat, and generally exist in the world. Reviewers have been correct to point out that none of these resource bars ever actually threaten you in any meaningful way. They feel like vestigial organs from an earlier design document, present but not doing much work. The Synchro Score is the one mechanic with genuine personality; the rest is scaffolding around the story. And the story is worth the scaffolding. The cel-shaded visual style holds up well, sitting somewhere between a graphic novel and a Saturday-morning cartoon, with character designs distinctive enough that you remember them after the credits. Ben Pronsky's voice performance as David is warm and grounded in a way that keeps the whole absurdist spectacle from floating away entirely. The soundtrack does that thing Swery soundtracks do, where an 80s saxophone riff appears at a moment of genuine tension and somehow makes both the tension and the saxophone feel correct. Here is the part that requires honesty. In October 2016, director Hidetaka Suehiro left Access Games and confirmed there would be no further episodes of D4. Season One is a prologue and two episodes, totalling around four hours, and it ends not on an ellipsis but mid-action, at precisely the moment when the larger story was beginning to breathe. The questions the game raises, including what the street drug called Real Blood actually is and who the hulking, cutlery-obsessed Ronald really works for, will not be answered anywhere. You are buying an artifact, a first act written by someone who did not know it would be the last. That context changes what the experience means, but it does not make it lesser, exactly. There is a completeness to the four hours on their own terms, even if the shape of the whole was never realized. Steam's community holds it with genuine warmth for that reason. If you go in cold expecting a full narrative arc, the ending will feel like a wound. If you go in knowing you are spending an afternoon with one of gaming's most idiosyncratic creative voices at close to the peak of his invention, that afternoon will stay with you. The PC port is functional but carries almost no graphics options, so set your expectations for a console-converted experience rather than a tuned PC release. Controller recommended for the feel; mouse works fine for the mechanics.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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