Dare to Dream

Dare To Dream is also a nifty little adventure game that Epic Megagames, if memory serves right, published. A description of the game (as well as the game itself (if you have the password):, from http://games.jadeinc.com/hotleaches.htm, which I found after a brief Google search):

Lead the hero Tyler through a vivid and imaginative dream in this graphical adventure game for Windows. You navigate through the world by pointing and clicking on items and passageways. Cartoon-style graphics and a surreal theme make Dare to Dream a must-have for adventure gamers. Requires Windows 3.1 or later, 4 Megs RAM.

It's a pretty whacked game, though. You play as a kid who has problems (due to parental death, as memory serves), and has fallen into a dream world. It starts out in a few downtown city streets (including Biff's!), and rapidly goes on to deeper, stranger areas.

Perhaps what was most interesting was its interface. It had a Myst-style view (ie, a finite set of first person images with clicking on arbitrary points to move and do things), with the addition of an inventory. The most annoying part of the game was figuring out where to click.

I never got past the bat, I think. Only ever played the shareware episode. Still, rather a fun game...

A three part point-and-click adventure about a young boy named Tyler (whose father has recently passed away) who wakes up to find himself in some sort of dream world, where ludicrous things happen like, say, talking sharks. He finds a magical key which can take him to an imaginary land inside his head, where he finds a creature formed from all his hateful or harmful thoughts. This creature, named "Christian", creates an entire Hell inside his brain.

Despite being pixel-based, one of its strong points is the weird imagery. Chapter One is an urban sprawl connected to a whimsical fantasty land by a sewer; Chapter Two takes the fatasy theme deeper, with a big sylized castle and talking animals; and Chapter Three takes you into, well, Hell. Such things as a forest of humans impaled on poles, a river of--literally--tears, and lines like "Someone is very unhappy, and you have an awful feeling it's you," make for a weird-assed experience. The game (and this is personal opinion. just opinion.) starts off strong and starts to fall apart by the end of part 2 and for all of episode 3. The problem was that exits were difficult to find; so it wasn't that you couldn't get the logic gears going and use x on y to acquire z, it's just that you had no idea the the screen for either x, y, or z even existed.

The music can get a litte grating at times (the freezing fire theme is particularly bad, but hey, it's in Hell). Sometimes there will be areas where you go from atmospheric, well-placed music to something LOUD AND OBNOXIOUS.

Overall, though, it's fun if you're a fan of Point-and-click adventures (I am).

Source: The game itself, MobyGames. Written mostly in Notepad while the email script was broken.