Recently, we took a look at the first six games in the Dream Day series, hidden object titles that have evolved nicely. With Dream Day True Love, the series takes a step back in gameplay but a step forward in story telling. It's hard to knock this game with an amazing story of 70 years of marriage (based on a true relationship). However, despite the emotion, the lack of hidden object scenes makes it hard to recommend it on its merits. There are missed opportunities in this title and we're not sure why that happened.

The couple, Bill and Helen, met in 1939 while Bill was on leave, being in the military. The story of their meeting was adorable - they went to a dance with different dates and left with each other. The game proceeds to give us glimpses into their lives together, told in ten year increments with each milestone wedding anniversary. The player is still the wedding planner, but in this case, we've been hired to throw a 70th wedding anniversary party to be held at an old family home. It's a beautiful story and hard to imagine living long enough to spend 70 years with someone. The fact that the story and the photos are all real creates a wonderful narrative for the game.

Outside of the story, though, the gameplay is lacking. For the first time in the series, the hidden object aspect isn't very good. Not only are the scenes not the object of the game, they almost seem like an afterthought. More time is spent playing a variety of mini-games, none of which are very compelling. The best is probably the fit the objects in a small space game, but even that never really presents a challenge. Several games are memory-types and are just not fun. This is coming from someone who loves memory games, so that's really saying something. As for the hidden objects, unfortunately, in a lot of cases, just looking at the screen made it obvious what was on the list and we did a lot of clicking before even looking at the words. There are some 'find the differences' scenes that present the most challenge True Love has to offer, almost frustratingly so.

Being a fan of the Dream Day series, we had high expectations for this newest title. On the one hand, the concept is brilliant and the story is told very well. On the other, the game itself is a disappointment. We enjoyed the voice-overs present in this title as it added authenticity, and the art style is still what we expect from these developers, but we really needed more hidden object scenes and so much more of the story could have been told through that type of gameplay. We only hope this was an accidental miss and not a trend for future games in this series.

Score: 7.1

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