Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child

A woman lives in a tree-house, without any recollection of who she is and how she ended up there. When asleep, she suffers recurring dreams showing a man holding a little girl, that she feels are her husband and daughter. After getting a distress message from a crystal ball, showing an image of the same man of her dreams, she starts a quest to recollect her memories and find her lost family.

Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child is the third installment of the adventure and hidden object game series. The interface has the classic slide-show presentation inaugurated by the venerable Myst, showing mostly static scenes where the player moves from screen to screen by clicking on exit hotspots, usually placed over doors and other entrances. Each room has several objects laying around, that are stored in the inventory after being collected with the mouse. When the cursor hovers over a part of the scenery with a place or object, their names appear next to it and the bottom interface displays a brief description. A journal at the bottom-right registers all the main events, and lists some of the main objects.

The game takes place in a magical land, with portals leading to distant places. They are accessed inside the nexus, a giant machine that acts as a hub with several portals aligned. They are activated with dream jewels, small pieces of jewelry found laying around (or later, cast in the forge), that have to be set with three colored gems, also scattered in the scenery. The activation mechanism is a puzzle, where two dream jewels have to be inserted and turned to mix their colors and reproduce the pattern above the portal.

Most puzzles can be solved using inventory items in a logical way, by dragging and dropping them over parts of the scenery. Some puzzles are mechanisms that have to be manipulated directly, like the door lock with alchemy symbols near the forge. Some books contain puzzles on their pages, where words have to unscrambled to complete a text with clues.