Dream Prisoner

Overview

Back in the olden days of adventure games, Alexander van Oostenrijk and Alexander Lentjes, two programmers from the Netherlands, set out to write Dream Prisoner, a wacky text & static graphics adventure game with a flexible parser. In the game, the player finds himself transported to a mysterious dream castle filled with strange people. The objective: to escape from this nightmare.

Escape will not be easy, however, since a number of logical and not-so-logical puzzles will need to be solved on the way. Some of the puzzles are of the find the key to fit the lock variety, while others are more intricate. Closely examining any object encountered during the adventure will be very helpful. If the player manages to escape from the castle, he would be transported back to his own world, as if nothing had happened.

Dream Prisoner is notable for its display of game text on top of the still image of the current game location.

Technical Specifications

Dream Prisoner was originally released for the PC platform in 1995. Written in Turbo Pascal, it boasted an Adlib music system that played Amiga MOD files converted to a proprietary format with some loss of quality. The graphics were 256-colour VGA with a 320x200 pixels resolution, which a still image for each game location. The game also allowed saving progress and restoring it.

A more recent incarnation of Dream Prisoner (2013) was released for the Adobe Flash platform. It retains the original game music, although with improved quality since the original MOD files are played. The conversion to Flash is faithful to the original game.

Controls

The game is controlled through text input. The player must type commands like "go north" or "hit the dwarf with the frying pan" in order to interact with the game.