Back in 2002, a friend of mine showed me something that I was never
going to forget, it was a roleplaying game called Mechanical Dream, with a main
rule book that literally flipped from
the light side to the darkside, having the mechanics and rules and character
creation on one side and all the sections involving the world on the
other. Just reading through it had me
hooked, and in the manner of all gamers with any trace of real gamer DNA in
them…
So, bought it, read through all the fluff, in which it describes the
world that the characters exist on, with the planet being a huge circle of
darkness called Naakinis, upon which was a circle of light some 30000 miles in
diameter called Kainas, with this being circled all the way around by a wall of
impenetrable darkness more than forty miles high called the Sofe. Light is provided not by a sun but by a
rotating pendulum and the whole world is subject to the vagaries of both the
day and then the period where the light does not fall and a phenomenon known as
the dream falls upon the world that the characters live in.
The dream is a manifestation of the built up energy of the world, where
the consciousness (or subconscious) of those who live in the area is given free
reign. The longer a place has been lived in and the more people that live
there, the stronger the dreams effects upon the world, so cities that have been
around for hundreds of years where once thousands lived can be massively
affected by the dream, whereas new cities only just established may be
comparatively safe in comparison. When the
dream falls, reality is affected in a number of uncertain ways and strange
effects can be seen through the world.
 |
| Is this the Dream? |
 |
| Or is this Reality...? |
The writing in the book was mesmerising, both poetic in its expression
but clear in the understanding of it. There were no fighters, no magic users in
this game, instead the players took on the mantle of Echoes, members of each
race who were able to channel their Eflow
(Chi, The Force, whatever takes your fancy), to use their various gifts and
gain information through something called a Whisper,
which is the voice of Eflow that
speaks to them.
Use the Eflow doesn’t quite
have the same ring to it unfortunately…
Character classes were imaginative, from the Judges who walked the world
like those from the Mega Cities dispensing justice for the greater good, to the
Nightmares, those completely taken over by the power of the dream that wandered
the world doing only what the Dream bid them do and in turn, were as far
removed from the normal world as any creature could be.
The book itself was excellent, with the same artwork in the inside
cover, but changed in a subtle manner to show the effects of the dream on the
same scene, the flip nature of the cover and the massive amount of artwork
within was a testament to the amount of work that had been put in by the
creators to make this exactly what they wanted.
There was everything you needed to play the game in the single book
although a second set of books were released in a slipcase format that detailed
a whole variety of different things, with only one particular difficulty…
They were all in French…
The Problem with Mechanical Dream, and the reason that I’ll never get
to play it, is that while we always reach towards the stars when we’re playing,
being locked away in something from which you’ll never get out (even if it is
the size of a planet in and of itself) creates a sense of imprisonment and with
it, a sense that you’ll never achieve the potential that other games offer,
even though said potential is just as elusive in those games as it would be in
this one. In fact, the very nature of
the world is that everyone is fighting to stay alive every day, stealing from
others is not only normal but encourages, cruelty is a part of everyday life,
and for a world where the light is provided by artificial means, there is no
secondary pendulum to provide the hope for the inhabitants.
There is no time for mighty quests when you have to get food to eat
every day…
The game system is reasonable, although clearly not playtested as much
as it should have been, and the background, while massively intriguing, does
not provide impetus for what the characters would be doing rather than trying
to survive every day, there is no career path to climb, no evolution of the
storyline and because it was a reasonably expensive when it came out, it didn’t
get the level of interest that it perhaps should have done.
This is a product that was clearly two peoples dreams, they saw this, they had a vision and they
made it the way they wanted to. They
dreamed, but as in the game, the dream can often turn out to be things that you
didn’t want as well and by 2004, the company was bankrupt.
Which is a crying shame, it truly is, something with this breadth of
vision and boldness of direction would surely have done well had it been
released in later years, as other people are embracing new worlds now with the
same vigour that the creators did ten years previous.
But if they ever do V2, I’m buying J
