Arcadia: El Sueño

El Sueño is a beautiful and fun game, large parts of which I struggled to enjoy: it was the second room in a row that I played in southern Spain where we found ourselves bombarded with unsolicited hints.

A good hint should be delivered at the point where the players are wasting too much time, or getting frustrated; and it should give just enough information to get them moving forward again, by focusing their attention on the right thing or suggesting an approach they hadn’t thought of. This is much harder to do well across a language barrier, in two ways: not only may the players struggle to understand the hint, but also the host will probably have less understanding of what the players have and haven’t thought of, and why they’re stuck. Perhaps for those reasons, we found ourselves getting hints at a excessive rate, before we’d really had a chance to consider a puzzle, even after I’d asked the host to stop, with the hints often being as confusing as they were helpful. Our host was a very nice guy who was trying hard to give us the best experience possible, but unfortunately had the opposite effect.

All of which is to say, it’s worth trying hard to establish expectations for hints before playing a game, at this venue and elsewhere. With a more normal level of hinting, I’d have little hesitation in recommending El Sueño.

It had some weaknesses: a set of questionable puzzles near the start of the sort that could be printed in a puzzle book, and another puzzle that was pretty but had dubious logic. But it also had a variety of entertainingly physical challenges and more satisfying puzzles, broadly getting increasingly fun as the game went on; and as a bumper 90 room there was plenty of time to forget earlier frustrations and settle into it.

The premise is that you’re in a nice dream, as opposed to the sister game Nightmare, and this translates to a sequence of pretty, intricate sets. The intention is that the game consists of happy good feelings, and in many ways it delivers. As long as you can avoid the over hinting, and view with indulgence a couple of weaker puzzles, you should have a great time playing this.