Most of the cities have been submerged underwater. An evolving city named Oniria has some elections coming up. The city is split into guilds, and crimes are happening among them. In Oniria Crimes you play as a Rounder, a member of an independent agency set to solve these crimes before too much chaos happens. Confused yet? Wait until I tell you that all of this is happening in dreams. Think of an MMO where there are guilds and tons of people who play hours on end. You will take on six cases total. Your witnesses? The objects and environment. They can all be talked to in order to gather hints. There will be three suspects and you must choose which is guilty and which is innocent. Will you be able to stop the imaginary bloodshed?

Here’s what I liked:

Cyber Detective — Dreams, the real MMO of the future. You aren’t just any detective, you solve crimes in a virtual world. Possibilities are quite endless. Because it’s all set in dreams, you can imagine how strange some of the situations are. As you figure out clues and suspects, your journal will fill up. Once you have enough information, you’re able to pick who’s guilty and who’s innocent by choosing which evidence points to the truth. Finishing a case will give you a page of statistics. It will reveal how many clues you found as well as how many correct deductions you obtained. If you want, you can replay the case and all of the progress you made will still be saved so that you don’t have to start over from scratch. It reminds me a little bit of the movie Minority Report, except there’s no way to stop the crime that’s already committed. I guess you could dream it never happened? If you like super science fiction themes, you’re in the right place.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

Mouse Trap — Your pointer is what you use to click on the various clues. It’s slow; and when you start the game it’s all the way to the left, making you drag it across the screen just to start. To go from one side of the screen to the other takes around six seconds or more. There is no setting to make this faster. If this is a port from PC, it’s a terrible one and there wasn’t any work to make things fast. The mouse icon is also a really odd-looking shape that’s supposed to be an arrow. It’s not fine-pointed, yet there are plenty of objects to click on that require you to be extremely accurate in where you press.

Every Little Thing — At first I thought it was really neat to be able to talk to objects in a room. Each thing has a different viewpoint and there are often a lot of them. Yet as creative as this was, it got a bit rocky. Finding the last few clues can be a huge pain. Then there are times you’re just clicking a bit too much. The stairs, for example. Each step is something you can talk to. It gets a bit tiresome and becomes a graphic novel instead of a mystery game. Then there’s the library. There are hundreds of books to click on and each has its own dialogue. Some are really tough to click on; you must have the cursor at precisely the right spot or else you’ll be hovering over another book next to it. I sat there for what seemed like an eternity, clicking everything that I could only to have still missed several. Even the cool titles couldn’t make me enjoy my time at the worst library scene in existence.

Let’s Try Something Different — To try to make each case just a little bit different, there is usually a different mechanic involved. The first case is quite normal and the only one that I actually enjoyed. Beyond that it gets clunky. The case with a robot is such a confusing scene. It appears some robot that threads banners (or something) has been destroyed. To get some clues you must link two together which is not only glitchy but a bad idea with how everything is laid out. Then there’s a library which you’ve already heard me complain about that has hundreds of books. From here it gets even worse. There’s a very short case on a train and I had multiple issues navigating it because of glitches. The last case is completely different. You must walk on a trail and choose different paths. What started out promising turned into a headache.

Bad Dreams — Despite such a simple design, there sure are a lot of issues. For instance, if you click the rotate room button too fast your level becomes unplayable. There’s also a train scene that just never seems to fully cooperate while moving around. You can replay crime scenes but it always loads you up on the last crime you haven’t fully solved, instead of the one you actually played last when you quit. It becomes clumsy just to get to where you want because you must attempt to solve the other one before being able to choose the scene you wish to play. A lot of improvements can be made to solve these issues.

Wrap-up

The concept can be confusing and captivating at the same time. This is how a lot of science fiction works. Things that don’t exist in our own reality can be a hard concept to grasp. The question I kept asking myself was “why?”. What’s the point? Who cares if someone gets murdered in a dream? Do they die in real life? None of these answers were made clear but it is possible I missed them entirely. The puzzles were extremely difficult and I only liked one of them, in which you match banners with words. There is a redeeming quality, and that’s the creative world and interesting crime scenes within it. But the clumsy navigation and fairly frequent bugs stop it short of being remotely entertaining. It seems like it is unfinished. There is even an option in the menu (to quit out) which is still not translated into English in the version I played. For the longest time, I didn’t even know what this option was because I didn’t know what it said. It ended up meaning quit, which is exactly what I’ve decided to do.

Score: Limited Appeal

Oniria Crimes was published by BadLand Publishing and developed by cKolmos Game Studios on Xbox One. It was released on December 3, 2020, for $19.99. A copy was provided for review purposes.