Review – Dream Day Honeymoon – Oberon Games

Platform: PC
Game Category: Seek & Find

Basic Idea as I See It: A true sequel to Dream Day Wedding, Robert and Jenny are now on their paradise tropical honeymoon and you get to help them find souvenirs in 19 different areas of the island (from their suite to the spa to the boat docks). So you get to look through rooms full of random objects to find items from a specific list. Every so often, there is either a honeymoon crisis where you have a shorter time to find objects in a familiar room where everything is changed around or a choose your own adventure type story, where you get to help the happy couple along on an adventure.

First Impression: A great challenge for me. I loved the pages in highlights magazines as a kid when I went to the doctor where they had 10 or so hidden things melded into the picture. The souvenirs were pretty amusing. The music was a little annoying. Plenty of time in the beginning to get familiar with the rooms and the souvenirs to find.

Playability: There are already some high scores on the game to beat, which to me is more of a motivator than just trying to beat my own scores from the beginning. There are enough objects and rooms to keep it interesting for a good while. The actual mechanics of the game are pretty straightforward. You find the object, you click on it. Although sometimes if you don’t click directly on the thing, it doesn’t register. If you click too many times on wrong things, it starts taking time off your clock (each time you click 3 wrong things in a relatively short period of time, it takes off a minute). But, if you’re careful, it’s not an issue.

Bells and Whistles: After most rounds of play, you get a memory game. Passing each memory game gets you one step closer to the final bonus round (as well as first class tickets for the newlyweds’ trip home and a super special gift for you). The memory games are more challenging than average because of quite similar objects on the flip side of the card. Most have one wild card to help out but after the first few, there is also a jumble card pair which will mix around the cards you have already seen if you turn them both at the same time. During regular play, there are 3 clues per round where a little cupid will shoot the arrow directly at a random object you have left on your list. There is no way to control this, by the way. There are also what they call birds of paradise (usually 2-4 per “room”) that you can collect. Each five you find will get you an extra clue.

Frustrations: The frustrations with this game were very few. I didn’t really dig the luauesque music and would have liked maybe another option or two, though there is a volume option for just the music which helped crank down the annoyance factor. Also, there are occasional items on the list that I don’t get. Either I don’t know the names for or I don’t associate the name with an object I see… for example, I call a shuttlecock a birdie and I don’t necessarily look at a tuning fork and think that is the correct thing when the list just says fork. It’s not always necessarily frustrating when the names mean different things, though. I kind of like the added layer of difficulty when a watermelon is a slice or a whole, or when walk means a walk signal, or lonely number is a 1. Also, you can’t play again without using a differentname, which is more confusing than frustrating – except the first time i tried before I figured it out. Lastly, and this is less of a frustration than something I would just like to see, it seems that the only thing that really affects the score is the overall time. It would be nice to have things like unused clues, memory game time, first time passes, and making the bonus level adding to the overall score.

Overall Opinion: The game is a good time. There are enough different things to keep me playing besides just beating a time, such as seeing the different options for the choose your own adventure stories and seeing what different gifts to choose. The one thing that surprised me was that my husband actually got into it a bit and was really interested in searching and actually seeing the things.

Female Aspect: You don’t really play a character other than yourself, but the choose your own adventure stories seem to be really balanced if not slightly female biased. The whole idea of souvenirs and such are kind of a girl thing anyway.

Rating Halos: 8/10