Ahnayro: The Dream World

Have you ever come back from the brink of death? I have. It happened when I entered the amazing realm of Ahnayro: The Dream World. Fantastic in it's simplicity, it tore into my very core of being and caused my life to pause. Everything has stalled since those simple two hours in the game. Now I see life through the lens of the lens crafter, and find the oblivion of nevermore has become my magnificent friend. "Oh come now," you might question, "what kind of depth are we talking about here?" I'm talking about the utter annihilation of ego. Pow! Every second measured in the present moment. That's what this game has given me - new life. It started when I saw the first puzzle and realized it was a metaphor for my life. Could there be more? Of course. I ended at 2 hours in, satisfied with a depth that cleansed the soul.

So first impressions, its good. But there is little to no tutorial, the tutorial that is there is confusing. And the greater game, if you don't know American History you are going to have a hard time of it. I do enjoy the game, but, I do say this disappointed, the clues are impossible unless you know America History and have in depth understanding of the links of history and trivia. DO NOT PLAY WINDOWED. Windowed will make some of the cipher wheels inaccessible. Good game, could be better. 6/10

Right, so, I actually won this game when they were unveiling it via answering a question correctly and getting the key for it. I loved playing through The Black Watchmen, got to take part in one of the live events called Operation Silver Sphere, had a blast. But, BUT, while I loved me a grand puzzle in dealing with spy movie level shenanigans of the core game and it’s more focused sister ones I have to be real here. If lack the time to set, say, maybe four or so hours maximum aside, if you despise researching things and going down rabbit holes, if you dislike games that act soley as a hub with the game itself being mostly you gathering clues from the pre-made websites and the like then you might not like this game. While not quite as bad as TBW it’s also not as kind about the digging you have to do for it, some of the stuff is obscure and I only knew some of it because I went down the rabbit hole as a kid and thus recognized some of the stuff there, frankly if you don’t like digging for clues outside the actual game itself as it runs in the background it’s probably not for you. But, if that is your thing, the game is pretty good. If you want to give it a try I suggest waiting on a sale to get the whole thing for cheap but I do like the games in general. Hope this helps

Ahnayro is a very unorthodox puzzle game. The main gameplay loop consists in the game giving the player a riddle with text and/or images, the player doing out-of-game research on the Internet to figure out the riddle and then inputting their answer in-game. In this sense, it's closer to a sort of single-player ARG or a trivia game than a traditional, mechanics-focused puzzle game like Baba is You or The Witness. The aforementioned gameplay loop can be roughly divided into two types of riddles. The first, which I'll call the "dream world" puzzles, are the trivia analogues - they're riddles about real-world historical events, religious beliefs, literature, (pseudo)science, etc. They're all pretty good: the riddles were only a bit ambiguous on one or two puzzles, and the way you input answers (by picking out "syllables" from a list) makes it easy to know when you're on the right track (if the answer is a French term, for instance, all the syllables are stuff you'd see on related French words). This means that riddles based on stuff I knew something about were easy to get right away, while riddles about topics I wasn't familiar with took some research, but were straightforward once I was done with it. The research itself was pretty fun - you can do most of it on Wikipedia (though Google and Google Image Search help a lot) and the topics the game covered were all really interesting. The second puzzle time, which i'll call "waking world" puzzles, are the ARG analogues. As you do the dream world puzzles, you unlock links to real Internet webpages and documents that you have to investigate, and then the game prompts you with a riddle regarding that alternate-reality research. These, surprisingly, still stand up - I played the game 5 years after release and only ran into a single dead link (if you think you've also reached it, [spoiler]the blog was moved from <username>.tumblr.com to <username>-blog.tumblr.com[/spoiler]). I wasn't as excited by these puzzles, but they were all still grounded enough in real life stuff to be interesting. I think the dream world puzzles aren't gated by the waking world puzzles (that is, you can finish all the dream world puzzles without touching the waking world ones), which is a nice touch. The pages associated with the ARG stuff will all eventually decay, and it's nice that the game is still mostly functional when they do. Overall, this is a pretty cool and novel game. I had fun and was able to finish it solo, but I could totally see it being a fun party or co-op game, too.

Great

Rubbish.

It's a decent game if you like esoteric trivia and doing research like an online detective. The game loop is couched in a nice Black Watchmen-like wrapper to give it a bit of theme and if you enjoy any of that, this game is likely for you.