Dare to Dream

For other uses, see Dare to Dream (disambiguation).

Dare to Dream
Publisher(s)	Epic MegaGames
Designer(s)	Cliff Bleszinski
Artist(s)	Cliff Bleszinski
Composer(s)	Robert A. Allen
Platform(s)	PC (Windows)
Release date(s)	1989, 1990
Genre(s)	Adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player
System requirements A 286 or faster processor Hard Disk
CPU	4 Megabytes RAM
Sound	Windows 3.1 or greater (or Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions) Any Windows-supported sound card
Display	VGA graphics Windows 3.x in Standard or Enhanced Mode

Dare to Dream is an adventure game produced by Epic MegaGames (now known as Epic Games), released in early 1993 for Windows PC. It is the second game designed by Cliff Bleszinski, after The Palace Of Deceit: Dragon's Plight. It supplements adventure-style gaming with graphics, although Dare to Dream relies more heavily on the graphics than its predecessor. The game is divided into three episodes: Volume One: In a Darkened Room, Volume Two: In Search of the Beast and Volume Three: Christian’s Lair.

Plot

The game centres on a ten-year old boy named Tyler Norris. He has developed quite a stress from school, his paper route and the recent loss of his father. Because of this he has vivid dreams until on a very bad day, he dreams of landing in a deserted alleyway in an unfamiliar city. He sets off in hopes of finding the source of this evil haunting him.

Gameplay

Dare to Dream is one of the few adventure games where the player cannot die or get stuck. The game screen features three windows simultaneously:

The remote, on the top left, contains buttons with the various game options: save, load, save as, talk, and inventory.

The status box, at the bottom, is the text feature of the game, describing the scenery and even providing back story when the player clicks on certain places on the action screen.

At the top right, the action screen is the interactive, graphical portion of the game. Whenever the mouse moves over a hot spot, the cursor changes to reflect the type of action possible. Single-clicking provides a text description in the status box of a particular object and its functions or of the player's location. Double-clicking performs the action or moves in the designated direction. Clicking on other parts of the scene often provides extra details, such as Tyler’s thoughts, tidbits of backstory, narrative action, and sensory descriptions such as smells and sounds).

Dare to Dream’s predecessor, The Palace Of Deceit: Dragon's Plight, uses this same window layout and gameplay style. Dare to Dream adds many enhancements, including MIDI music, PC speaker sounds, popup windows, and animations (both sprite and color rotation). There are more supplemental text descriptions to describe the scenes and more narrative action. It also uses fewer compass directions to provide orientation in favor of more natural words (“ahead”, “behind”, “left” and “right”).

External links

• Dare to Dream's entry at Home of the Underdogs