Dreamweb CD

Dreamweb is one of the darkest adventure games DOS received in 1994, and the version hosted here is the CD release, which added full speech to the original. You play Ryan, a bartender in a rain-soaked near-future city, plagued by recurring nightmares. In them, the keepers of the so-called Dreamweb tell him that seven powerful people threaten the balance of the world — and that his task is to kill them all.

That premise alone shows what makes the game unusual. Right to the end you cannot be sure whether you are on a mystical mission or reading the diary of a very sick man, and the game refuses to settle the question for you. For its time it went remarkably far: some of your victims are ordinary, defenceless people, they plead for their lives, and one scene contained nudity that was genuinely shocking by mid-nineties standards. The controversy earned Dreamweb a firm adults-only reputation.

The perspective is the other oddity: you view every room directly from above, a rare choice for an adventure game. Objects are tiny at that distance, so the interface provides a magnifier — a small window enlarging whatever sits under your cursor. It works, but you will still spend more time hunting for small items than you should, and the story is strictly linear, marching you from one task to the next with few detours allowed.

It is worth playing anyway, because few games of the era have an atmosphere this thick. Endless rain, filthy streets, oppressive sound, and Ryan's diary — which in the CD version is actually read aloud, turning the entries into the spine of the whole narrative. It is not a pleasant experience, and that is precisely what its creators intended.

You can start the CD version of Dreamweb on oldgame.cz directly in your browser, no installation needed.