Playfirst, KatGames and Big Fish Games have brought us Dream Chronicles: The Book of Air, the first in a new episodic series of adventure games with hidden object elements. Now hidden object games don’t thrill me all that much. Sure they can be entertaining but I always thought them far too passive. Well, Dream Chronicle is anything but. Focusing more on the adventure game elements it presents you with a fair amount of puzzles of varying difficulty complexity.

I have to admit, I was sort of stumped on one for a good 20 minutes, but I still managed to finish the entire game in under five hours. It doesn’t track your time but it does give you a score and a rank at the end. However, it doesn’t seem to have any sort of online leaderboards in it so that’s just a personal thing (it tracks high scores locally, mine is 10.5 million, can you beat it?).

You play Lyra who comes from a rather astounding family which you find out as you go. Something happens and she is pulled out of her dimension and dropped in another one, which is almost an exact duplicate of her own. Her grandfather, being a rather clever fellow, is able to send her messages and hints on what to do and where to go. Her father on the other hand is a crafty inventor and lover of cryptography it seems as that is his favorite form of protection.

Your task is to solve the puzzles and get home. Along the way you’ll pick up dream pieces which will allow you certain special powers to help you on your way. Puzzles vary from simple Chinese sliding puzzle types to jigsaw, pattern recognition and logic. The diversity of the puzzles kept it from being boring throughout the whole game.