Hi there!

Go mighty uhm... Pyjama man, kill that Monster with your Fish!

Yes, it's called Weird Dreams for a reason!

Well, like many other Rainbird titles the game was shipped with a novel telling the background story of this game, which I didn't bother to read. I'm getting it so far, that you're playing the dreams of someone who is undergoing some kind of surgery, since when you die in the game you wake up in a scary looking operation room scene

The game can only described as a surreal trip in action-adventure cloth. You start playing inside a candyfloss machine and once you make it out of it, a giant killer wasp starts chasing you. And it only gets weirder from there. The dream has half a dozen scenes, each of which is 3-5 screens big.

The graphics of the C64 version are pretty good manual conversions of the 16-Bit screens with only a few details lost in the process. There's not much music in the game but the little bits present are creating a proper atmosphere. Navigating through the dream isn't so much a problem of solving the riddles, but rather of the slowly responding controls. Still the game is considerably easy and over much too fast:

I think it was a great concept for a game. Not unlike todays Silent Hill games, albeit a lot more freaked out. Still, it should've been at least thrice as long and the gameplay could've used some more polish. If you're bored tonight, give it a try!

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another Rainbird game in the form of "Tower of Babel", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel