Similar to the fourth game, it was met with mixed reviews from casual game critics, describing it as "a pure point-and-click adventure experience of the old Myst school of gameplay, with some minor hidden object elements mixed in," though they heavily criticized it for "having let the Dream Chronicles franchise down" and for being short, dull, uninteresting, and ending terribly, which is "bound to leave a bad taste in your mouth." The game itself was moderately successful, and reached the top-ten of the charts in most major casual game charts, but failed to attain the top position in any of them. It only reached the top of the iWin.com's Top 100 Games and Shockwave.com's Top Download Games chart. Compared to other games in the series, it is the lowest charting and reviewed Dream Chronicles game to date. The Book of Water was preceded by Dream Chronicles: The Book of Air (2010).
As PlayFirst had initially announced and The Book of Water's final scenes implied, there would be a sequel called Dream Chronicles: The Book of Fire to be released. But soon after The Book of Water was released, since July 2011, PlayFirst cancelled releasing casual games on PC/Mac platforms in order to focus on its growing mobile gaming market. Because PlayFirst holds the rights to publish the Dream Chronicles series, that forced its developer KatGames to move on with other projects; namely The Cross Formula, a Dream Chronicles-alike game was released in early 2012. Partly due to that cancellation, The Book of Water was cut short its development time, thus making itself felt unfinished and awkward; it was also the last collaboration between PlayFirst and KatGames, and The Book of Fire will not be developed and released.
Gameplay
Dream Chronicles: The Book of Water is structured much like Dream Chronicles: The Book of Air and other games in the series with some minor twists. There are not so many improvement in gameplay overall compared to other Dream Chronicles games. It is more of a quest-like adventure than a traditional hidden object game, a mixing of adventure and puzzle game. Featuring loads of puzzles and logical quests with different difficulties, The Book of Water still assure that puzzles are well-tricky and tightly blended with the story, which is a typical feature of quest or click-and-point games. There are no lists of items to find but a huge amount of inventory based puzzles, logical riddles and quests to solve, which have been scattered through the locations in the game. The objects that players find may be used in a scene other than the one they found it in. Objects will stay in inventory until players need to use them. All objects that players are able to pick up will serve a purpose, whether they are used in that scene or not. A lot of times in this game the pieces players pick up may only be used as they get to the next scene. Some items may not become visible in a scene right away, players must perform other tasks first before they become visible.
The hint system is much more evolved and enhanced than all of previous Dream Chronicles games. Players can use "Locator" button on the left edge to highlight objects that they can pick up, including Dream Pieces. The "Locator" needs to be fully charged to work, and it will charge up over time. But if there are not any, the power of hints is not used. Some puzzles have a skip button available, players just have to wait until it is filled to use it. There is also a help system at players' disposal. By clicking on this button, players will be revealed a hint or objective in a board. The hint or objective disappears from the board when is achieved. The notable feature, which only featured in the Collector's Edition of the game, is that players can play as Faye in the bonus chapter, besides playing as the main character Lyra. Play as Faye in the prequel to Lyra's journey in The Book of Water find out what happened just moments before Lyra's story began.
Like the previous game The Book of Air, Dream Chronicles’ feature factor called "Dream Jewels" come with four special powers (one ability was lifted compared to the fourth game). They can be used to light up a dark place ("Illuminate"), reconstruct objects of things broken apart in pieces ("Weld"), reveal invisible things or secret ("Reveal"), and permits seeing someone Lyra love that is far away ("Vision"). In order to activate Dream Jewels, players need to fill them with Dream Pieces which are thrown throughout. At the end of the game, players earn an overall high score. The faster how players can complete the game, the more Dream Jewels and Dream Pieces they can find, the fewer times they skip puzzles, the better score they will earn. When players play again under the same name, some of the key items themselves will be in different places the second times around.
Plot
An 18-year-old half-fairy half-mortal girl named Lyra had a strange dream in which she could not seem to wake. A man called the Clockmaker sent her searching through a strange, unearthly realm to find golden keys and return them to the Crater of Time. Now Lyra had found her way home but as she approached her beloved Town of Wish, she found it beset by a terrible storm. Waking up from this dream, Lyra soon realizes her real-life situation, and lands her airship from the storm safely. Entering the Town of Wish, Lyra finds out that her hometown is completely isolate as everyone has left. She enters her house, and sees her father Fidget lying terribly ill on the sofa. Lyra picks up the note left by her mother Faye, and surprisingly discovers that her family's biggest rival, the Fairy Queen of Dreams named Lilith, came to Lyra's house with her 10-year-old son, Kenrick.
