Bygone Dreams review for PC

According to its developers, Bygone Dreams is the end result of nearly a decade of development. With that kind of dedication, it’s hard to give the game a bad review.

The thing is, it’s also hard to give the game a good review. That’s not to say it’s a bad game, because it’s not. Rather, it’s somewhere in between, a so-so game that feels like it needs an editor and an identity, in that order.

The editor part is obvious right from the get-go. You start off with a cutscene, then wander for quite awhile, periodically – and infrequently – coming across enemies. You’re told to follow some mushrooms, except the mushrooms never appear on the screen, so you’re basically just wandering until you finally trigger a cutscene. It all feels like a lot of wasted time, space, and energy, and I can’t help but think that it might’ve been a more interesting start to the game if something (or, really, anything) happened.

There are few explanations of what you’re supposed to do when you start the game, but that doesn’t really matter…and that’s where Bygone Dreams’ identity – or lack thereof – comes into play. Even though the game slowly doles out information as you explore the world, if you’ve ever played any action game you’ll be able to figure it all out pretty easily. All of it feels incredibly familiar, from the attacks to the blocking to the ranged weapons to the level design.

The same goes for the characters, the story, and the world too. It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill fantasy world, with everything looking and feeling like the most generic fantasy tropes you can imagine. Allegedly Bygone Dreams was heavily influenced by Slavic folklore, but if you’ve ever played any vaguely fantastical action game in the last twenty years, this will all seem very familiar.

Just about the only thing the game does differently is in the places where being different isn’t so great. The boss levels tend to be massive difficulty spikes, and they basically screw you over really early on – though the game saves most of your progress just before the first one begins, it doesn’t save any of your consumable items, so if you try using them during the first boss battle and fail, you’re out of luck and need to go grinding back through the area leading up to it if you want to get those consumables again.

But ultimately, a few weird design choices aren’t enough to sink the game – just as plenty of predictable design choices can’t possibly do enough to elevate it. Bygone Dreams is a generic action game in desperate need of a personality, and without that, there’s not much point in getting it.

Prime Time provided us with a Bygone Dreams PC code for review purposes.