As I Began to Dream

A dream world built from grief

As I Began to Dream is developer Strayflux's puzzle platformer, published by Soft Source and released 19 November 2025 for Windows. Players control Lily, a young girl who wakes in a mysterious limbo world following a personal loss she doesn't yet fully understand, accompanied by a small, strange creature named Flippy who several reviewers single out with real affection. Structured around the five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, each chapter reimagines a manifestation of Lily's life and memories as a distinct hand-illustrated diorama that players navigate and reshape using her core ability: the power to move, swap and rotate pieces of the environment around her to open new paths forward. It's a slower, more contemplative structure than most puzzle platformers, built explicitly to let each stage's visual identity and mechanical twist reflect the emotional state it represents.

Art, music and a story reviewers describe as genuinely moving

The single most consistent thread running through As I Began to Dream's review corpus, small as it is, is enthusiasm for its presentation and emotional storytelling. Reviewers repeatedly and specifically praise the game's hand-illustrated art, describing the dioramas, cutscenes and colour work as consistently beautiful across every chapter, with more than one reviewer specifically calling out the game's use of colour and lighting to distinguish each stage of grief visually. Music draws its own repeated, specific credit, with reviewers describing a calming, evocative soundtrack that reinforces the game's atmosphere particularly well in its quieter, more reflective sections. The five-stages-of-grief framing itself draws consistent praise as a thoughtful structural choice rather than a surface-level gimmick, with one detailed review specifically crediting the game for showing "what Lily actually feels and thinks" through each chapter's distinct tone. That emotional weight lands with real specificity for several reviewers: one writes simply, "lost my parents recently and now I'm playing this," while another describes the game as "one of those games you know will punch you in the gut emotionally, in a good way," a reaction that recurs across multiple reviews regardless of how each reviewer felt about the mechanics underneath the story.

Puzzles that deepen, and platforming reviewers find clunky

The core swap-and-rotate puzzle mechanic draws specific, repeated credit for depth as the game progresses, with reviewers describing genuinely complex applications built from a deceptively simple starting concept, and several noting the puzzle difficulty ramps up meaningfully between the game's earlier and later chapters. Set against that praise, a specific and independently repeated complaint concerns the platforming itself, which multiple reviewers describe as noticeably clunkier and less precise than the puzzle design surrounding it, with one detailed review noting the controls feel too imprecise "for how finicky the mechanics work." That complaint concentrates most heavily on the game's fourth chapter, representing depression, where several reviewers describe an unexpected and unwelcome shift into a chase-and-evasion format, being pursued by an enemy while navigating platforming challenges, that multiple reviewers found jarringly difficult relative to the rest of the game's more contemplative pace. One detailed review specifically describes needing help from a sibling to get through that section, noting sparse checkpoints meant dying often meant restarting a long stretch from the beginning, while conceding the sudden tonal shift is at least thematically appropriate to the chapter it represents.

A small but consistent voice, and a second half some feel is less polished

A smaller, related thread of complaints concerns overall polish in the game's second half more broadly, with a couple of reviewers noting visual inconsistencies in later platforming sections and suspecting some puzzles in the later chapters weren't as thoroughly tested as those earlier in the game. It's worth noting explicitly that As I Began to Dream's review base remains comparatively small, 33 total reviews at the time of writing, so the broader consensus on its weaker mechanical elements carries less statistical weight than the near-unanimous praise for its art and music, which appears consistently across nearly every review regardless of how a given player felt about the platforming. Even reviewers who specifically flag the fourth chapter as a low point in the experience uniformly continue to recommend the game overall, framing the mechanical rough edges as a real but ultimately secondary concern next to the story and presentation.

A small, first-hand-feeling studio effort

Strayflux's approach to the material reads throughout the corpus as personal rather than formulaic, and several reviewers specifically credit that sincerity for why the game's grief framing lands as well as it does. One reviewer who describes themselves as someone who "doesn't play games of this genre and style very often" writes that As I Began to Dream still managed to feel like "a genuine gem that is crafted with love," a sentiment echoed by another reviewer who specifically thanks the developers by name in their review for how carefully the message was "developed and delivered." That underlying sincerity appears to be doing real work in softening reviewers' patience with the game's rougher mechanical edges: even the small handful of reviewers who explicitly call out clunky movement or an unfair difficulty spike in the fourth chapter still frame those as forgivable missteps in an otherwise heartfelt, carefully constructed experience, rather than reasons to dismiss the game outright.

Value

At NZ$23.49, As I Began to Dream sits at a reasonable price for a narrative-driven puzzle platformer reviewers commonly describe finishing in a single extended sitting, with hand-illustrated art and a grief-themed story several reviewers specifically credit as worth the price on their own. The Positive score, 30 positive against 3 negative across 33 reviews, reflects a small but genuinely enthusiastic review base won over by the game's presentation and emotional storytelling, tempered by a specific, repeated complaint about clunky platforming controls and a difficulty spike in its fourth chapter that even fans of the game are willing to name directly. For fans of narrative-driven puzzle platformers with real emotional weight, in the vein of Gris or Röki, As I Began to Dream is worth a look, with the understanding that its mechanical execution doesn't consistently match the strength of its art and story.