I’ll admit, when I first saw the trailer for Hitori De Productions’ Dream Cage, I thought it was going to be an interesting concept of mixing sleep paralysis terror with spooky anomaly hunting. Sadly, this is another one of those “fooled by the trailer” horror games.
From the official write-up for the game, it’s about a 50-year-old man named Robert who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and is addicted to pills. Now you have to look around his apartment and find anomalies and notes for five nights. I’ll be quite honest. The game did a poor job of making you want to care about the story, because it almost feels like there is none.
When you find one of Robert’s notes, there’s no point in caring because you can barely read the text. The whole point of these notes is to unlock the “true ending”, which, after playing through for the first time, I can go to my grave not knowing it and be happy.
You can only see anomalies through a camcorder, and one use of the camera eats up a battery, which is very unrealistic. So you have to go through the apartment finding both pills and batteries. The pills help keep Robert’s sanity meter down and keep the sleep paralysis demons away. There are ten anomalies in each level, but you need at least seven to go to bed.
The game really lacked scares. Again, someone who thinks they know horror games created a game where LOUD NOISES = pant-shitting fun. The noises are annoying and not scary at all.
The anomalies are scripted (so you’ll always find them in the same place every time), the batteries and pills randomly appear in places, and with a little finesse, you can exploit how much you are grabbing through a glitch I found.
Overall, this game was not fun and won’t be worth the $10 they’re going to be charging for it. Avoid this as much as possible!
