The Dreamhold Reviews

I have been playing text adventure games since the very first one, I still remember the excitement of getting a new Infocom or similar game and diving into it and losing myself in new worlds. I have kept up with some of the recent releases and even played this one some on the pc. I was excited when I was able to play my old games on the iPad but it just seemed to be missing something that prevented me from diving back into the old masterpieces. What you have done here is provide that missing piece. The map feature you have added is awesome, the ability to just in a few taps bring up frequently used words and type commands and even take notes is fantastic. I would love to see Interactive Fiction take off again with full length games and the features you have added here in this one. Great Job!

I would have liked it even better and may have given it a full five stars if there had been more peril and a more climactic ending. But it was a very enjoyable game, nonetheless.

It's a thinking mans game, and it's wonderfully well thought out. Came back to re download

I've played for about 15 min and have not seen any errors. Very friendly for those new to interactive fiction -- the auto-map is beautiful, and I love being able to personalize the margins and line spacing. At first I thought it was not possible to enter words by tapping them on the screen -- there is no visual feedback if you tap once, so it didn't occur to me to double-tap. (I'm sure that feature is described in the instructions somewhere.)

I've tried every text adventure and interpreter (such as the venerable Frotz) there is for the iPad, and I think that The Dreamhold brings a few new things to the table. The auto-map, which I suppose might irritate purists, is an idea whose time has clearly come. Likewise, I think the Achievements, which are something I normally disdain, seem to somehow make sense as a way of marking one's progress through the game in some manner beyond a simple numerical score.

I never write reviews but this is the best game EVER. My friend personally knows Zarf, and she showed me this game. I've been playing it for a few days now, non stop. Please get this game right now. It's free for a LIMITED TIME people. Also, Zarf is my spirit animal. If you want to look him up his real name is Andrew Plotkin but he doesn't like that so please refer to him as Zarf.

...but this game is fantastic! The story is well-written, and the puzzles are challenging. It kept me glued to my screen the whole time.
As a first-time IF player, the tutorial and help screen were helpful. Don't be afraid to try this game if you're new to the genre, too.

In the past, I'd only played some short, low-effort interactive fiction, so this is the first real one I've tried. I really like it. As a big fan of escape-the-room games, I loved Dreamhold's puzzle aspect, as well as the fact that it let me use my imagination.

However I can't play because right away at the bottom I see a message that says "Fizmo fatal error. Caught signal 11, aborting interpreter." And when I tap to enter text a dialog comes up that tells me TheDreamhold has encountered a serious error and must quit. I have iOS 5.1.1 on an iPhone 4S.

Anyway I love the idea of packaging each game as an app and I look forward to playing this one and many more!

Digging through quite a few of these text adventures in iTunes & found most of them to be crap.

This one most certainly isn't.
Very nicely done.

This game was exactly what I was looking for, and I really appreciate all the effort put into it. The fact that there's a long description for anything you can "examine" really shows all the time spent in making this interactive.

Great time killer and the map helps a lot

But soulless. Not very fun. I needed a walkthrough; knowing what to do or having to figure it out myself made little difference in the fun factor. Still, kudos on the totally free, really clever game.

Excellent game, intriguing story, very expansive and detailed, very nice tutorial for IF gaming.

I was really looking forward to playing this game but I too got the text of death. It's so sad!

It did it to me too... The same Fizmo error. 4S on 5.1.1.