Ruby Dreams: Immortal Promise is a free, short visual novel mixed with interactive mini puzzles. Using clues you unravel in your dreams to win over your masters.

The Story
This is a game that was created by a small team as part of the NaNoRenO 2024 (a challenge issued to developers to create a complete visual novel within a month). 

You play as the hired help to the Beaumont Family at the request of your mother. Your sleep is riddled with dreams of secrets to uncover in the waking world about the mysterious Beaumont Family and their connection with your mother. 

In the game you can romance three potential mates; Sebastian, the cool and composed one who is fiercely protective of the ones he loves. Roderick, the charming and flirtatious one. And finally Alexander, the arrogant and impulsive one. You gain favor with each of them through the choices you make and levelling up a "love meter".

Gameplay & Visuals
The options are your usual display options, resolution, audio controls and text speed. Once you get through the tutorial section a journal becomes available which houses a gallery of artwork you unlock during gameplay, music scores and you love meter stats. 

The game is broken up into two parts. The visual novel part which is your usual beautiful 2D art and the second part of the game is an interactive, 3D environment when your character is dreaming. Really beautiful contrast in art styles.
The dream world also consists of mini-games such as puzzles and interactive objects. As you solve them the bigger mystery of the Beaumont family members unravel. The mini games are played with your keyboard using wasd controls and a mouse for moving your character. The game does say it has controller support but myself I used a keyboard and mouse.

Tips & Tricks

• The mini games are not able to be skipped
• The game has no save feature but you can replay a day but it will erase all progress from that day forward, including mini games. Yes you have to play them again.
• The only mini game that became tedious to me was collecting the mirror pieces (6 in total) but you only carry 2 pieces at a time so you back-tracking three times to collect all the pieces.

Audio
This game for the most part is not voiced outside of the times when your character is dreaming. However the voice work, when present, is really well done. 

The soundtrack, especially in the dreaming parts, is atmospheric and blends well with story. Mysterious, relaxing and uplifting.

Overall Experience
For a free, short visual novel mixed with some interactive puzzles it was overall a nice time. Due to the time restraints for development do not expect a deep narrative. But for what it presents the artwork was beautiful, the characters likeable and the mini puzzles a nice twist.

I did find after having to replay the puzzles a few times to be tedious as they are all the same format pretty much. And if you have to reset a day to pick different answers it erases any progress following. Since there are no options to manually save it would have been nice to let us rewind the narrative so we could just go back more easily and pick a different answer.

Overall if you know what to expect going in and for the price of free it is some mindless fun for a couple of hours. 🩸

Review originally posted on Steam

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