YuME: Alice’s Dream Game Review

YuME: Alice’s Dream (夢, Yume, means the word ‘Dream’ in Japanese) is an enchanting optical illusion puzzle AR game. You play as Alice, a girl trapped in a dreamland and her memory is lost. You follow Alice, helping her find her memory in a beautiful fantasy world.

This Augmented Reality game renders really stunning visuals that really captivated me and caught my attention. In some AR games I just lose interest after a few minutes because the presentation was just unimaginative and boring to look at, but in YuME: Alice’s Dream, this is completely the opposite, the world is mysterious, dynamic and exhilarating.

Before we move on talking more about this unique game, let’s watch a short gameplay video, just to give you a tastes what this game is about.

Everything looks really charming, starting with the beautiful visuals and captivating music, all  that is enfolded with imaginative an engaging storytelling. Speaking of visuals, in each level, once you look up, you’ll be able to see that the entire top area looks like a night sky full of stars. This is the first time I experienced these type of atmospheric visuals in an AR game and it was a beautiful moment to behold and also a very relaxing experience I must admit.

Here is a screenshot from the game showing the beautiful night sky as it rendered in the ceiling in the living room – Stunning!

When I play AR games, it doesn’t happen every time that I get hooked. The developer NetEase Games seems to work hard so people will feel pulled into this mysterious world of Alice straight from the start.

Of course at its core, this is a puzzle game. The puzzle-solving experience uses  optical/visual illusions. This means that you’ll need to move around and turn the scene (using swipe motion) to align certain objects in a certain way in order to finish each level and progress through. In Some puzzles, you’ll need to perfectly align different objects or rotate them to create a specific drawn shape.

It might sound simple, but in fact it’s quite challenging. Maybe my thinking is  way too complicated and this is why i had problem solving some levels. For example, I was stuck for about 20 minutes on one level. I just didn’t know what to do. At the end, the answer was not complicated at all, but it took me time to figure it out. Sometimes the answer is just in front of you, but you need to try out many things before you reach to the simple solution.

YuME: Alice’s Dream is also a very relaxing experience due to its  clean visuals, calming color palette, unique and interesting objects, peaceful background music and the thoughtful puzzle solving experience.

The game doesn’t require ARKit to work but that explains why it’s tracking is not so accurate. It happened to me that the rendered world just snapped out of position and start floating in the air as I start viewing the night sky during one level. Other than some of the graphics glitches, the game works really well and I haven’t encountered any other issues.

There is also one thing that kind of annoyed me when I get a message or need to switch to another app, the game doesn’t remember your last location and you need to choose the level and start it from the beginning. The game does remember your progression, so in any case that the app closes, you can just load the previous level and play it from the start.

The level design is absolutely stunning. There are complex and detailed structures, some look like a spiral, others are two-sides or use high elevation. In one of the levels, I had to turn the map around just to find out that there is a second hidden part with more puzzles to solve.

This game does require you to move around the level. This is not a game for those who like sitting while playing. You have to be on your fit and try out different angles until you nail it just right. Some people will like it, others might not. I personally find the whole physical activity in AR games to be really refreshing for a change.

This is not the first iOS that uses optical illusions to solve puzzles, but it’s one of the most compelling and comprehensive ones. While many puzzle games focus on just straight up puzzles and nothing more, YuME: Alice’s Dream AR game adds much more to the mix, including high-quality detailed visuals, great music, and storytelling. All those things make this game stand out from the rest. Even if you don’t like these type of games, I highly recommend trying this AR game out, it’s also free-to-play, so give it a shot.