History VideoGame / DareToDream

This AdventureGame takes the player inside the mind of the 10-year-old main character, Tyler Norris, whose inability to cope with the death of his father has brought something evil to life in the depths of his troubled psyche. Through the powers of a magic key, Tyler transports himself into the world of his dreams, to confront his dark side before it destroys him.

* CatapultNightmare: [[spoiler:At the end of Part 1.]]

* FunetikAksent: The Bloody Stump is written as if he has a Scottish accent. Which is...unexpected, to say the least, for a talking tree in the depths of Hell.

* GratuitousPrincess: Lissa, a girl who lives in a cardboard castle in the happy part of Tyler's imagination. She seemingly sees Tyler as a KnightInShiningArmour who'll slay the "dragon", his evil split personality.
* GuideDangIt: A lot of the game's puzzles can't be reasoned out, and require the player to just try everything and go over every pixel, until they find something that advances the game. [[spoiler: Like using a dead fish to unlock a door elsewhere on the game's map, or thinking to use a shotgun on a boat's porthole to make an item you aren't told about go shooting out of its smokestack. Or perhaps the piece de resistance, that you're supposed to pick up a skull, go back and throw it through a window, pick up the glass shards, and use them to cut a flower, which you then hold up to turn a menacing bat to stone.]] While this can be excused with the explanation that the game takes place inside a young boy's imagination, it doesn't make the experience of actually playing the game better.

* NewPowersAsThePlotDemands: The Key of Enigami, the {{Macguffin}} that opens doors into {{Dream Land}}s, is also used in the ending to destroy the BigBad. It's made clear that Tyler knew it could be used this way, but where he got the information is a total mystery, especially since it wasn't mentioned at all until it happened.

* TalkingAnimal: A lot of the characters in Tyler's imagination are seemingly-ordinary animals that talk, tying into the game's theme of Tyler growing out of the fixtures of his childhood, like cartoons with talking animals.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: The "Story so far" of episode 1 has Tyler's mother say that Terry is "not exactly" Tyler's best friend, and the episode ends with the realization that they're having a SharedDream. Throughout the game, Terry doesn't appear anywhere other characters can see him, or do anything Tyler doesn't know about. Turns out that [[spoiler:Terry is Tyler's ImaginaryFriend, much the same way that Christian is his imaginary enemy.]]

* DreamLand: As you might gather from the title, the entire game takes place in Tyler's dreams -- the first episode literally, the last two in a much more mystical sense thanks to the Key of Enigami.

** The first game has a pile of skulls in a strange windmill. You're supposed to hunt around and find the one you can take, to solver another puzzle.

* EmptyRoomPsych: There are some areas that seem like they should be relevant, but have no purpose. [[spoiler:One's in the second episode, a statue garden with a likeness of Bouf, a character from the first episode, and a sad turtle that otherwise doesn't appear and who seems to be looking at something on the ground. Seems like a place you're supposed to do something, but really just there to fill space.]]

* HypnoticEyes: The second and third episodes both have an obstacle where Tyler's paralyzed by a statue with hypnotic eyes he can't pass until he finds a way of neutralizing its gaze.

* PixelHunt: There's a pile of dust on the first screen of Episode 3 that you need to pick up. It is completely invisible and the only way you'll find it is if you happen to mouse over that spot and see your cursor change to indicate an interactable object.
* PlotTriggeringDeath: The shock of Tyler's father dying causes him to repress all negative emotions, which form into an evil personality unto itself inside Tyler's mind, who he has to confront before it can destroy him.

* CerebusSyndrome: After a mundane-yet-surreal episode 1 and a goofy-cartoony episode 2, episode 3 sends Tyler to Hell itself, spooky forests and cemeteries full of bones and blood. The earlier goofiness is quite forgotten.

* CoolKey: The Key of Enigami, which is worked into the shape of a unicorn and allows Tyler to enter his dreamscape.

* AshFace: At one point in the first episode Tyler shoots a surly bartender with a shotgun, and he looks like this in the aftermath.
* {{Balloonacy}}: After filling up a balloon with helium, Tyler's able to use it to float all the way to the roof of a building.
* BagOfSpilling: Tyler loses all his inventory at the end of the first episode (that is, when he wakes up). He deliberately throws away everything except the magic key at the end of the second episode.

* ArtisticLicenseHistory: [[MacGuffin The Key of Enigami]], a magical gold key topped with a ceramic unicorn, is supposedly an ancient North American Indian artifact. This is in spite of the facts that unicorns did not exist in their mythology, [[WorthlessYellowRocks gold wasn't commonly used for much of anything]], and the name sounds [[AsLongAsItSoundsForeign more like Japanese than a Native American language.]] While the game [[JustifiedTrope justifies]] some of its more outlandish events with the AllJustADream conceit, the key is one of the few things that's supposed to exist in the real world.

* ArtisticLicenseHistory: [[MacGuffin The Key of Enigami]], a magical gold key topped with a ceramic unicorn, is supposedly an ancient North American Indian artifact. This is in spite of the facts that unicorns did not exist in their mythology, [[WorthlessYellowRocks gold wasn't commonly used for much of anything]], and the name sounds [[AsLongAsItSoundsForeign more like Japanese than a Native American language.]] While the game [[JustifiedTrope justifies]] some of its more outlandish events with the AllJustADream concept, the key is one of the few things that's supposed to exist in the real world.

* DreamLand: As you might gather from the title, the entire game takes place in Tyler's dreams -- the first episode literally, the last two in a much more mystical sense thanks to [[{{Macguffin}} the Key of Enigami]].

* ImaginaryFriend: [[spoiler:Tyler's best friend Terry is a figment of his imagination. He's also the benign counterpart of Christian, the game's BigBad.]]

* SharedDream: Towards the end of episode 1, Tyler finds his best friend Terry in his dream -- though Terry claims it's ''his'' dream, not Tyler's. It's never directly followed up upon, but [[spoiler:Terry being Tyler's ImaginaryFriend handily explains it]].

* RedAndBlackAndEvilAllOver: The third episode's color palette is mostly red with lots of dark blues and blacks.