Meet Oscar: Twitch streamer and self-proclaimed enthusiast. One Sunday evening, he announces his latest project: an Internet archeology investigation of a long-abandoned fan forum for a lost 90’s TV show, Dreamland, Ohio. His collaborators are Hopper, Ari, and Gray, fellow content creators from a variety of genres. Now they want your help.
You solve a cipher from the show and begin investigating the forum, piecing together information about Dreamland. The show focuses on the wacky adventures of four protagonists — Ethan, Yume, Amari, and Russell — as they investigate a secret group around the town of Dreamland. In the season finale, Ethan is stabbed — but by who? The show never answers this question; Dreamland was canceled after season one.
The investigation continues; tensions escalate between the content creators, and further mysteries unfold on the forum. Why was it suddenly abandoned? Why would anyone put up with Superluminal, the forum’s tyrannical moderator? Why were big-name fans SL33PY and ChooseCarefully constantly at odds? Who was NI, and why were they banned at the worst of times?
Gray announces a juicy reveal of something groundbreaking she’s discovered about the forum. During her pre-release stream, she happily answers unrelated questions but refuses to spoil her discovery. That surprise will be uploaded in a video to her channel following the stream.
And then a masked figure kills her. In front of everyone.
Quickly, it becomes clear that the culprit was one of the other three content creators. Using their location history and alibis, you deduce the culprit’s identity: it could only be Oscar.
In addition to finding the culprit, you find out that Oscar was hiding the discovery Gray promised before her death. When you recover it, her unreleased video drops a bomb: the events of the forum mirrored the events of Dreamland. She’s deduced that Yume must have stabbed Ethan, just as Superluminal banned NI. The other big-name fans on the forum also match up with the show’s protagonists. It’s a cycle: there are four characters enacting four archetypes, and the story always ends with a death of sorts. Soon afterward, everyone involved disappears, as if they’d never existed.
Under pressure from Hopper and Ari, Oscar reveals the true intentions behind his archeology project. Oscar planned to trap all four content creators in a reenactment of Dreamland, and you are a bystander in the third iteration of the cycle. If it isn’t stopped soon, everyone involved will disappear.
Time is running out for Hopper, Ari, and Oscar — and you. Can you investigate the past to find the origin of the cycle? Can you and your friends end the story once and for all? And will you escape Dreamland before it’s too late?
Winners
- duck. tied for first and snolved all the snuzzles.
- John Newlands Hate Club took joint first place while resurrecting a dead meme about a dead guy from a dead game.
- Mothermancy 2: Return of the Necrofuckers: 2 Mother 2 Mancy: Back in Black: Electric Boogaloo made it to endgame again and got away with third despite their spectacularly long team name.
Special Mentions
- Our entire playerbase this game did a lovely job of building theories and friendships and we are very proud of them! <3
- One player brought a plot bingo card to endgame, but did not get a bingo. : (
- Players concocted some awesome game-themed Discord statuses. : D
Game Materials
- Solve the Awoken cipher and hope you don’t become part of the fourth cycle! :O
- Find the secrets, and the terrible fanfictions, of the Dreamland Investigators Forum! :S
- Chuckle at some of Gray’s older videos: the lost history of muppets and some tea-time outtakes! XD
