It seems that no matter where a furre goes, she just can’t escape the bar. In FurN these tend to be elaborate, nonsensical, sprawling affairs filled with chapels and indoor waterfalls. In Imag, however, the bar takes on a completely different but just as clichéd face; the Ye Olde Taverne and Inne. Now, the skullkitty has been in plenty of Ye Olde Taverne and Innes in her day — from the Moonstone Mask to Traitor’s Gate — and she’s pretty down with that. She’s also been through Ye Olde Towns and Villagese from Vivec to Port Foozle, and if there’s one thing that the skullkitty is pretty sure about, it’s that the two are generally not one and the same.

Enter the Broken Dagger Tavern and Inn. This mouthful of a dream seems to be suffering from something of an identity crisis, because the actual ‘tavern and inn’ part of the dream is a very tiny component indeed; the vast majority of the rest of the space seems to be occupied by numerous generic fantasy town buildings — general stores and barracks and so forth, but oddly no things like peasant huts or farms — thrown haphazardly amongst what has got to be one of the most unconvincing forests in the whole of Furcadia.

It’s an unfortunate truth that very little of the scenery in the Broken Dagger particularly lends itself to praise. The patching is largely generic and uninspired, it’s true, but there’s still enough base material here that a talented dreamweaver would be able to throw it together in a way that was at the very least interesting. It’s hard to say exactly what feels missing from the interiors especially but there’s definitely something; a lack of attention to detail that leaves the place feeling far too hollow, far too sterile. The overall placement of the buildings within the exterior scenery doesn’t help much, either. Again, it’s hard to place a finger on exactly what’s going on here, but unlike the last medieval village we reviewed there’s nothing about the Broken Dagger that feels alive. This is especially true of the exterior ‘forest’, and an effort has been made to throw in features like a stream and a cave. However, once again, uninspired ‘weaving renders the effects fairly disappointing; the bodies of water, especially, have the most unconvincing and ramrod straight edges the skullkitty has ever had the misfortune of seeing.

This feeling is not at all helped by some highly shonky dreamweaving; the place is absolutely crawling with the kind of clipping and layout errors that drive us up the wall here at F!W. It’s no coincidence or feat of careful editing that almost every single screenshot collected for this review contains at least one glaring error in it, and at no time is the visitor every allowed the illusion that they’re looking at anything other than player-created content. The DS here too is almost non-existent. Transition effects are handled adequately but other than that the place is fairly devoid of interactivity; the entry text entices a player to type !commands (kudos at least for activating the silent speech prefix) only to reward them with a painfully short list. I couldn’t get the door lock commands working at all, and considering that’s two out of the dream’s three we’re not exactly looking at a very good hit-rate. The external area is littered with signposts, however almost all of these are deathly silent and no amount of bumping could entice them to give up their secrets.

The news is not all bad, however, and the Broken Dagger wins back some points for its community which, if the forums are anything to go by, is smallish but nevertheless active. When the skullkitty was sneaking around getting screenshots there was at least one active RP session going on (and quite a number of idlers), which considering the highly off-peak times your favourite reviewer usually gets online was impressive.

Overall, the Broken Dagger is probably worth a shot for anyone looking for long-term, continuity RP in a medieval-town style setting, though it has less to offer for casual dreamhoppers and sightseers.

Overall Assessment

• Pros: A small but seemingly active community.
• Cons: Uninspired patching, lazy dreamweaving and an identity-confused layout.

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You know, innovation is a funny thing in Furcadia. The skullkitty has seen some brilliant dreams in her travels, and she’s seen some terrible ones. But every now and again something comes along that somehow manages to straddle the fine line between both; we last saw it here in the review of the Twilight Chateau which managed to be sterile and uninspiring at the same time as being aesthetically appealing. In a lot of ways, the Bare Rump Club is the exact opposite; aesthetically uninspiring it nevertheless hides some dreadfully clever ideas… though you’d be totally excused for missing them.

Ostensibly a bar, the initial entry rooms to this ‘club’ are only really inspiring by their size; or rather lack thereof. In a place where gigantic, labyrinthine mazes are the norm, on initial inspection the Bare Rump Club only appears to consist of three rooms; an entry foyer, bathroom and the quintessential bar. While this is not a bad thing in itself, it hardly warrants a full review. Nor is the patching here anything to write home about; while some effort has obviously been put in to create an array of original and semi-original objects, the overall style means that a visitor could be forgiven for not noticing the difference from Furc’s default patch set. This is not necessarily a criticism in and of itself… unless, of course, you don’t happen to particularly like Furc’s default style which — as regular readers of F!W will know — I don’t. And while that might seem petty, it’s nonetheless going to be a turnoff for many otherwise potential regular visitors.

In fact, there’s only one clue given to the visitor that there might be something else going on here, when bumping into the portrait beside the fireplace in the bar brings up a most enticing emit. Those of you who’ve ‘figured out’ Furc!Wank’s official digopile dream, The Grotto, would be forgiven for getting the impression that the skullkitty is a bit of a fan of old-fashioned text-adventure games.¹ She’s also quite disappointed that this genre is not more well-represented within Furc, especially since the simple item-puzzle commands tend to fit in quite nicely with DS. Lest this review give the wrong impression, let it be said that the Bare Rump Club certainly doesn’t feel like it’s made by Roberta Williams. But the fact that following the portrait’s instructions leads to a kind of secret room is refreshing in a way that most of the — let’s face it — fairly brain-dead dreams of Furcadia really aren’t.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the tour ends there, and in a way it does; while there is a large second portion to the dream, it’s currently not accessible via anything other than a DS command. The skullkitty has been reassured that the dream is still ‘in progress’, however, and eventually the two halves will link together for easier public consumption.

The second half of the ‘club’ is not actually a club at all, but rather a large, sprawling homestead. The skullkitty was pleasantly surprised to note that — unlike every other ‘home’ she’s ever visited in Furc — this home actually felt like, well, a home. The bathroom was blessedly free of fluffy pillows and no room felt overly large, or overly useless. Overall the place has a particularly meticulous air about it, and most rooms have been carefully crafted with the kind of clever eye for detail that is easy to overlook in its understated skill. To put it another way, the house works on a micro level, not just the ‘macro’ patching that is so common in Furc.

The dreamweaving itself is tight and neat, with no obvious clipping errors or other annoyances, but it’s in the DS that the Bare Rump Club really starts to shine. To whit; it’s brilliant. It’s brilliant without even being particularly ostentatious; one of the most impressive effect is the way all closed doors open when a furre steps in front of them. This is so obvious, really, but this level of detail is so rare in Furc that it deserves a special mention. The discovery of a second ’secret passage’ meant randomly bumping into items has never been so fun. But if there was a single effect that impressed more than all the others combined, it was the inclusion of a ’staff panel’ hidden in the skin and activated by a spoken command. This is a brilliantly devious idea and one this particularly reviewer has never before seen used in a dream. ² Check the screenshot and mark it well, dear readers, because the skullkitty is getting the distinct impression that we’re going to be seeing more of these in the future…

Overall, I’m not quite sure what to say about the Bare Rump Club. It’s certainly not the most trendy dream in FurN, but it does hold a collection of brilliant ideas and the kind of loving attention to detail that we always tend to praise highly here. I suspect we haven’t heard the last of this odd little ‘club’. Watch this space…

Overall Assessment

• Pros: Some of the hands-down cleverest DS I’ve yet to see. Tight dreamweaving, high potential.
• Cons: Somewhat bland patching. The unfinished nature of the two ‘halves’ mean the average punter is going to miss out on most of the good stuff.

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1. For those of you who are too young to remember this genre, for the good of humanity go play Zork right now!
2. Which is not to say it hasn’t — thought I wouldn’t be surprised.

What makes a good dream? It almost seems like an odd question, coming from a self-proclaimed dream reviewer, but maybe that’s the point. So I’m gonna ask it again; what makes a good dream?

I have to admit I was a bit baffled when the request came down to review a dream that was only referred to as ‘TC’. I was originally going to track it down the hard way — by visiting every single upload with the initials ‘TC’ in Furc — until the neonbat once more came to my aid and pointed out that the abbreviation is short for long-time FurN staple, the Twilight Chateau. I mean of course it was; hell, I’d even visited the place, once upon a time. So armed with that knowledge I booted up an alt and threw myself in for a little look-see.

From the moment I walked into the place I knew TC was a dream I really, really should like. And there’s certainly a lot to like here. The ‘weaving is some of the tightest I’ve seen yet, with virtually none of the kinds of clipping errors that plague most dreams. I didn’t see a single room corner sticking into the edge of my map the entire time I was there, which is almost a first for F!W I think. The DS is minimal but smooth, and all transition effects and handled flawlessly. Like I think I’ve mentioned previously, I’m a bit of an aesthetic sucker for dreams that use black-and-accent colours. TC pulls this idea off aggressively, sticking to an almost exclusive palette of grays, blues and foliage green. It’s simple, it’s neat and it works. The whole place is oozing with gardens and water fountains of the kind that would make Frank Lloyd Wright bristle enviously. It’s the kind of thing that I’ve seen fail miserably in other dreams but TC manages to pull it off fairly convincingly.

Like I said, there’s a lot to like about TC. A lot to like except…

Except what makes a good dream?

Sure, TC is technically solid. The patches are far from original but they’re all nevertheless high-quality and carefully selected. I think that’s the thing, though; everything about TC feels excruciatingly carefully selected. From the cutsey local species (a kitten and the kitterwing) to the fluffy pillows to the very dream layout itself. If you remember a couple of reviews ago I was talking about what I call the Big Six Public Dream Rooms; the six places that every single dream in FurN is apparently required, by law, to have.¹ Well, I couldn’t find a chapel in TC but I found no less than three bars, two strip clubs, about a zillion private rooms and a pool/sauna… though with all that water flowing about I kinda had to wonder what the point was. I saw at least one emit mentioning an arena, too, though I couldn’t really locate it. Sort of a bit like the tattoo parlour; there was supposedly one ‘near the bar’, but the rabid uniformity of TC’s architecture made it a little hard to locate. If you’re thinking that the place sounds huge from the description then you’d be absolutely right; it’s a rabbit-warren. Not only that, but I get the sneaking suspicion that it actually feels much bigger than it is; the uniformity of the rooms means it’s easy to walk through the same place several times from different directions without realising it (I only noticed when I was collating the screen shots). And this is where I start to run into my real problem with TC.

Yeah, it’s pretty all right. But it’s pretty like Paris Hilton; a vapid, calculated prettiness that hides the complete and utter lack of any kind of substance underneath. Twilight Chateau wants to be popular; the desire oozes from underneath every fluffy pillow and from behind every curtained architrave. It wants to be the next Golden Tether; the place where all the trendy digokids and their fae, hermaphrodite gosurori characters hang out². The only problem is that scratch away the pretty veneer on TC and you’re left with absolutely nothing; no continuity, no community. There’s not even really any roleplay here; it mostly just feels like a vanity chat-room for someone else’s self-insertion persona-play ‘cuddling’. And I mean, while that’s great for the owner’s immediate circle of friends, Twilight Chateau just doesn’t feel like a private dream. Like the stereotypical fat girl on MySpace, it wants to be popular and it’s going to whore itself out hard to get there.

Digokids, I love you guys, really. I love you and your characters and your identical dreams, and maybe you’ll enjoy soaking up the vapid prettiness of the Twilight Chateau for at least a little while. Maybe. But there’s little here that feels original or even really particularly creative, and overall the whole place is so soulless that I just can’t bring myself to recommend it as anything other than a morbid analogy for everything that’s wrong in online communities.

Overall Assessment

• Pros: Technically solid.
• Cons: It’s totally soulless and if it tried any harder it’d be awarded the Golden Boot.

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1. If you’re wondering, they are; a bar, a strip club, a chapel, private rooms, a bathroom and an arena.
2. Fair disclosure; I am absolutely one of these people.

You know, I’m going to have to be the first one to admit that when it comes to patching and dreamweaving I think I’m pretty goddamn jaded. Cutting my teeth in FurN meant that for quite a while I honest-to-gods only saw the one dream; over and over again. Sometimes it was done well, most of the time it wasn’t, but overall you knew what you were getting into. Same patches, same layouts, same fucking strip club. I thought I’d seen it all… then something comes along to knock your metaphorical teeth out. A dream that takes all the usual Furcadia clichés, throws them all out the window and serves up something so professional it feels like walking into a Nintendo DS game. Seriously. I’m not even exaggerating all that much.

Even those of you who haven’t heard of Kaelin’yFiae (do you live under rocks or what?) will have seen her¹ high-quality patches, either in other people’s dreams or — more recently — as part of the incredible-looking Wylde. Draygans Hollow is her well-established (literally) personal dream, uploaded as a staple part of Imag, and I have to admit that I’ve popped my head in there a few times in the past. You know you’re in trouble when you’re trying to write an impartial review of a place you’ve already considered joining. So to hell with all that; I’m not even going to try being impartial. Which is fine, because Draygans Hollow doesn’t need it; one look at the screen shots (a record amount for any review thus far) should instantly sell this place to anyone with half an eye. Make no mistake; it’s beautiful. It’s more than beautiful; it’s a dream that knows 100% what it is, what it wants and how it wants to get there. There’s no wasted space at all; every nook and cranny feels alive and lovingly hand-crafted. From the slightly worn floorboards to the creeper-wrapped statues this place feels like exactly what it’s supposed to be; a living, breathing fantasy village.

I think that’s the secret, really. There’s always a certain something that separates out the true ‘it’ dreams from the rest; something so small and so natural that most people probably don’t even notice that it’s there. With The Golden Tether it was the Mint Mink’s incredible ability to use light and animation. In the Hollow it’s patching that makes you forget the limitations of Furc’s engine by serving up landscapes that are so fluid and so… well, professional is the word that keeps popping up into my head. The interiors especially honestly look like something out of a Japanese isometric RPG. And not in that cheap, second-hand ripped graphics way, either; in the truly original sense. It’s the little details again that are the killer; the lintels and the bookshelves and the spinning wheels. The fact that you can sleep in either the top or bottom bunk. The fact that not only doesn’t the dream baulk at serving up north-east facing backed chairs, but does it such a casual way as to make it feel totally unobtrusive… do you think I’ve gushed enough over the patching yet?

Maybe, but as a refugee from TGT if there’s one thing I know it’s that beautiful patches are only half of the story; a dream with a rubbish community is just that. The DH forums are almost criminally quiet, but what discussion is there seems mature and thankfully reasonably drama-free. And while there’s definitely a solid continuity going on in the background, the mods seem fairly relaxed and players are — within reason — mostly free to participate in it or not. To be honest I think this is absolutely the way to go for a large-scale, popular dream (give players a backdrop to work against but don’t limit them too much) so maybe I’m projecting here a little, but what I’ve seen of the DH community gives off nothing but positive vibes. Unfortunately, timezones mean I wasn’t able to get into the dream during a peak period to spy on (or even participate in) some roleplay… but then again, I guess I’ve got to leave something for you people to check out for yourselves, right?

We’ve gotten down this far with nothing but fangirlish gushing, and I have to be honest that it hurts a little that this review isn’t absolutely flawless. There are some minor quibbles. Like I said, timezones mean that all the times I’ve managed to peek into DH have been during the dream’s ‘night cycle’. While I like the concept in theory, I have to admit I’m not 100% enamoured by the execution. If you’re running a client that natively supports proper day/night and weather transition effects (by which I mean mFurc) then okay, but I’ve never been a fan of the ‘toned overlay’ effect that’s used in DH. There’s something about it which seems to almost cheapen the quality of the patches underneath. Plus it’s messy around the edges, and it always seems to leave holes. Of course, there’s literally no other way of doing this effect², which is a bummer of a limitation in Furc’s engine. There are a few other niggles here too; the skin is very unfinished (as you can see from the screenshots it relies on parts of the default patch and will screw up if, like me, a visitor has replaced their default skin), avatars walk on top of water instead of ‘in’ it, I found one corner of outside where it was possible to see inside, some of the forest edges look a bit choppily unfinished and ‘Draygans’ probably needs an apostrophe.

But you know what? I’m really only mentioning these things here because they’re the kind of thing I’d be ripping into a lesser dream for having. The sheer unadulterated awesomeness of the rest of Draygans Hollow means that, fuckit, who cares? The lore, the patching, the DS and the vibe all mean that the positives here not only outweigh the negatives but totally obliterate them. The dream’s foundations are rock solid… and there’s a whole bunch of stuff I haven’t even gone into (can we say four fully-realised local species?).

Overall, Draygans Hollow is an absolute must-see; if I gave ratings, it’d get full marks. If there’s one dream in the whole of Furcadia that deserves to be the next ‘it’ hangout, it’s this place. Of course, whether the owners want it to be is another story…

Overall Assessment

• Pros: Stunning visuals, solid design, mature and friendly community… you name it.
• Cons: Fuckit who cares. Stop reading this crap and go there already!

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1. And I’d just like to say I’m guessing gender here and I am so sorry if I’m getting it wrong…
2. Okay, you could possibly achieve it with a fucktonne of DS and two whole versions of every item in the dream, but… ouch. Time intensive much.

I suppose since May is the month to celebrate the release of Furcadia’s official feral map, The Wylde, it might be time for F!W to dip its cloven hooves into reviewing a private feral dream as well. It was with this in mind that I wandered into Hollowood Reserve. Now, like I’ve mentioned previously I’m not particularly predisposed to feral RP, but I sure as hell don’t have anything against people who do, which seems to make me pretty rare around Furcadia. There is a lot of anti-feral sentiment out there, which to me always seemed a bit daft. Sure, you’ve got your fair share of puppy play and ‘tail-hole’ licking but there are equally stupid things that go on in two-legged anthro communities, so it’s not exactly like any of us here can get up on our high horses (if you’ll excuse the pun).

Anyway, so I took a trip to Hollowood. The dream was fairly empty when I visited, though looking back through the place’s forum posts it looks like it has seen busier days. Hollowood is definitely a continuity dream, which probably cuts back on its numbers a little, but the place definitely looks well cared for, with a wide range of custom avatars and portraits ‘in development’ (in the meantime there are some perfectly serviceable placeholders). The custom skin, too, is interesting and seems to have a slightly wider viewing angle than your run-of-the-mill Furc window. To be honest, though, I’m not sure if I think the skin ‘works’. It’s very busy; which I think is the point but I’m not sure if I like the whole way it blends in with the game window… but maybe that’s just my preference for minimalism talking. The skin also suffers from the problem of transparent buttons; it uses pixel fonts, and you have to actually click on the pixel (not on the transparent area around it) to activate the button. This makes some things a bit hard to click, which is a minor annoyance.

The dream itself is beautiful. I’m starting to get the distinct impression that I like wilderness style scenery — it makes a nice change from the miles and miles of strip clubs and private yiffing rooms, at any rate — and there are definitely some hugely beautiful visuals here, including a ridge overlooking a mountain background that just made me go all gooey inside. Like all dreams that take multiple patches, however, Hollowood does have a few niggling style clashes, especially between the greenery (which looks mostly hand-drawn) and the rocks (which look ripped from renders or photos). Some of the placement of shrubs and grasses, too, is sometimes a bit too ‘blocky’, with too many of the same object stacked next to itself. But again, these are small things and only a minor distraction. Hollowood seems huge. I’m not exactly sure whether it actually is, or whether it was just me getting lost, but unlike in indoor dreams where nothing annoys me more than thousands of useless rooms, the vastness of Hollowood very much worked in the dream’s favour; it is the wilderness, after all. I’m also fairly certain I didn’t get to see the whole place; certain areas seem to be locked off, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed a fair bit of outside scenery as well.

So visually, Hollowood is spectacular. Unfortunately, I wish I could leave it off there. Alas, the dream seems to suffer from a not insubstantial amount of bad clipping. Quite often I found myself walking over instead of under treetops, or with my head buried underneath a waterfall, or inside a rock. I wish I could honestly say that these errors as a product of the usual problems in Furcadia when dealing with large avatars however I can’t quite bring myself to believe that. Some of it is just messy. There’s also a bit of a lack of sitting and lying objects, not to mention that some things which look as if they should be walkable simply aren’t (one particular fallen log over a stream bed stands out especially). I really wish I could say these things are ‘minor’, but considering the obvious care which has been put into developing the feel of the dream (from the darkened area of the forest to the last vestiges of civilisation — represented by cut grass — outside the cyclone fence) these errors stick out glaringly and keep Hollowood from feeling truly polished.

At the end of the day, however, Hollowood Reserve is still a beautiful and lovingly-crafted dream. It’s definitely work a look; if not for the continuity then at the very least for the technical aspects… and a screenshot overlooking the mountains.

Overall Assessment

• Pros: Beautiful dreamweaving, seemingly solid continuity.
• Cons: Clipping errors prevent the dream from having a truly polished feel.

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I have to admit, I was not one of those people who was especially looking forward to the release of Furcadia’s official ‘feral’ home; the Wylde. I don’t dislike ferals, but the whole thing’s just not really my bag (unless there’s anyone out there with a good cyberpunk feral RP). Nevertheless, I figured F!W could do worse than a bit of blatant cashing in on this new zone, so in the spirit of things I decided to write up a review. So I zoned in.

From the first time the screen loaded, I knew I was in for something other than the usual Furcadian main-map scenery. Now, I’m not going to make any secret of the fact that I don’t particularly like the default Furc patches. There’s something about the dithered art style that really doesn’t do it for me, and makes the whole game look extremely dated. Yeah sure, the palette is only 8-bit but… so what? Until very recently, so were most games for handhelds and oldbies like me can even remember the days when all computer games were 8-bit. Within Furc itself, the innumerable number of highly-talented patchers (and even fairly mediocre patchers like yours truly) have shown us time and time again that you can do a lot with a little. Of course, the talent rattling around in the player base only served to highlight even more starkly how… lacking the main maps were.

And then the Wylde came.

Most of you are going to recognise at least some of the scenery that appears in the Wylde; like with the Kitterwing and Ferian avatars, DEP got the community involved in creating the visuals¹ and it shows. The Wylde is beautiful in a way that no other main map is. Divided into thirteen ‘biomes’ — from oceans and beaches to a farm to a desert — the Wylde oozes artistic competence, and you’ll have to excuse me for saying but it finally feels as if Furc has come into its own aesthetically. The other thing that’s immediately obvious is the lack of dream upload pads. Or not the lack, exactly (since this is an upload map and all), but rather the clever way they’ve been integrated into the scenery; they’re bolt holes and tussocks and hollow logs and stable doors.

I wish I could be so enthusiastic about the rest of the DS. Each biome is bordered by glittering yellow lines which mark the map transition to the next area. Except… if you’re actually going to have a map transition — and to be honest I’m not sure why the Wylde does, since the majority of its biomes seem to flow into one another — this is probably the absolute worst way of doing it. Transitioning from one biome to another doesn’t take you to the ‘other side’ of the exit as with just about every other computer game in existence, but rather to a fixed point in the centre of that biome. If this sounds like it would be disorientating, let me assure you that it’s much worse when you’re actually there. It’s the kind of poor DS that I’d be ripping into a private dream for having, and the Wylde loses major kudos for it.

That minor niggle aside, I have to say I love the Wylde. I still don’t think I’ll be doing much feral RP any time soon, but something in me gets all warm and fuzzy inside to think that — in this day of increasingly complex 3D-graphics — such a beautiful place has been created from such such limited tools.

Overall Assessment

• Pros: It’s beautiful.
• Cons: Some of the DS is not just oddly redundant but downright confusing.

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1. The cynic in me has to wonder a bit whether or not they were compensated for their work; DEP is a company, after all…

Somewhere in Furcadia there is a fantastic vampire-themed dream. It’s beautiful and original, with purposeful rooms and an ominous but elegant atmosphere. The kind of place you could really imagine as being a favourite hang-out for immortal, damned creatures of the night. Actually, I know such a place exists because I’ve been there. Alas, Vampire Manor isn’t it.

It’s not the fact that the dream is built with exactly the same patches as every other dream out there that makes Vampire Manor particularly uninspired. It’s the fact that it uses exactly the same floor-plan. This is supposedly a ‘manor’ and yet we’re initially dumped into an uninspired courtyard entrance with no apparent external doors. The sheer number of internal doors, however, is far more intimidating than the brightly-lit blood fountain and somewhat unconvincing Grim Reaper and werewolf ’statues’. I’ve only been here for about five seconds and already my art-sense is tingling; not a good sign for the aesthetic congruity of the upcoming tour. Bravely pressing on revealed innumerable ‘private rooms’. Some effort has been made to differentiate the room décor, however the overall arrangement is fairly similar and the actual rooms themselves seemed physically far too large. Plus… why so many? It seems a lot of wasted space for a dream with only three people (one a ‘bot’, one yours truly); this is a theme that continues throughout the dream.

I’m tempted to describe the place as a labyrinth, however this would be a bit of a misnomer since there are very few ‘corridors’; instead almost all rooms immediately join off the courtyard. I’m not sure if I like this system or not; it’s very easy to find your way between rooms, but at the same time it feels almost… piecemeal. Like very little planning has been done with regards to the dream’s flow. Though now that I think about it, this is probably less something that’s due to the courtyard arrangement per se so much as the dream itself. The patching is ho-hum — a lot of Indigo Nightfall — but even the quality pieces can’t save this dream from what is some really shoddy dreamweaving. ‘Clipping errors’ — being able to see the corners of other rooms — abound. Trees grow out of the floor. Pools of blood end in neat square rows against vibrant green grass. The line between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is blurry (and not in the good Frank Lloyd Wright kind of way). Some rooms lack walls for no apparent reason. What little DragonSpeak is present is also of somewhat dubious quality. The door-locks are especially flaky (and poorly-animated), and it’s possible to lock them and get outside before the lag kicks in. The ‘lock’ simply makes the square in front of the door unwalkable, which is annoying in itself. Seemingly random items make you sit down, such as the blood on the floor in the ‘Torture Room’ (whose image I apparently forgot to upload). Items pilfered from Diablo rear their ugly heads once more, as well as some eviscerated hanging corpses I swear I last saw in the original Doom.

Vampire Manor not only takes the Big Three Public Dream Rooms, but it extends it out to the Big Six; a bar, a strip club, a chapel, private rooms, a bathroom and an arena. In fact, there’s very little in this dream that feels like a ‘manor’ at all. There are no sitting rooms or corridors, for example; just a bunch of ‘common’ dream locations thrown together. There’s almost no cohesion here that makes me feel that I’m in a real location rather than just someone’s development sandpit.

Like I said at the start, there’s gotta be a good vampire-themed dream out there somewhere, but Vampire Manor sure as hell ain’t it.

Overall Assessment

• Pros: Relative ease of navigation. Nice, big text box.
• Cons: Too large for its population. Poor use of space. Uninspired design.

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… a bar. At least, that sure is what it looked like; just like every other bar in Furcadia. The patches seem to be a bit of a mish-mash, but there was a certain familiarity to the scenery thanks to the Mint Mink’s universal patch, which contains various objects regulars to the old version TGT will recognise. I have to admit now that I’m a sucker for dreams made with a dark neutral (black/grey) accented by one or two predominant highlights. It’s done to death, but nevertheless I think there’s a reason for that and at the very least it prevents those dreadful, headache-inducing rainbow realms.

I was, however, not just a little bit amused to see that not even this fearsome group’s ominous headquarters was immune to the apparent mandatory requirement that every single dream in FurN have a pole dancing stage. Stripping aside, the dream uses the technique of ‘two height’ walls; a simple trick which serves to give it a sense of scale even in the smallest rooms (just watch the wall shadows).

There are very few public rooms in TH and even though I was deathly fascinated by the oubliette in what one can only assume is Qix’s ‘office’, there seemed to be no way for an outsider like yours truly to access any other parts of the dream… if they exist (I swear I’ve seen screenshots). You’d have to be pretty dense not to realise this dream doesn’t sell itself as being aimed at casual public RP, but does this then mean it can’t be reviewed? Well, as you can probably guess I think that it can; mostly because to me Twilight Horizons seems almost… schizophrenic. The whole place is set up as some secret group’s super-secret hideout, yet oddly it contains two of the Big Three Public Dream Stock Rooms (the third — a chapel — was thankfully nowhere to be found). It’s almost as if the dream is half-heartedly trying to attract a large crowd of wannabes in the ‘public’ areas all oozing for their chance to be let into the back rooms. I really dig the idea of small-scale, RP-themed dreams but my advice for anyone attempting to set one up? Think carefully about what would actually go into whatever location you’re mapping out and stick to that; don’t just randomly throw in room simply because every other dream uses them (I mean… a bar?).

That small issue aside, the rest of the patching is spartan but acceptable, and doesn’t suffer from the kind of random unnecessary clutter and out-of-place items that plague a lot of dreams. Because the patches are taken from several different artists there is some stylistic clashing which annoys me to no end but is realistically almost unavoidable. There are a few Duns’ka-specific items thrown in, and unfortunately it’s these which provide the main negative points in the dream’s visuals; the rendering of the banners is disappointingly flat and the north-west hangings suffer from very unfortunate and distracting clipping errors. This is particularly annoying in the smallish ‘office’ room where the banners take up a lot of real-estate and should theoretically inspire a sense of majesty and ownership. Those flaming brazier/pillar things turn up again, too; I’m somewhat of the opinion that they really should have been left back in Diablo.

Overall, Twilight Horizons probably isn’t really a destination for us wandering randoms just looking for a pretty place to sit. But it is an interesting study in the design of a private RP dream, which makes it worth a look for the aspiring Dreamweavers out there.

Overall Assessment

• Pros: Elegant use of space, purposeful rooms, thematic patching.
• Cons: Interesting private-RP concept let down somewhat by the inclusion of ‘public dream’ elements.

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