Somniloquy is a jazzy repartee-based battle system game where you do Undertale dodging, and combine it with some conversational persuasion systems. Depending on whether you succeed or fail these encounters, you get different endings! It's a great concept...
...and it's backed up by effervescent, crispy writing that just dances on the page. It's clear that HuntingSwan knows exactly how to play those notes, just dance on those story-beat keys, for me, will you? Will you really, now - will you, darling?
The hilarious caricatured battlers shoot out pine trees and pickles at your "heart-like object" (we're thinking Undertale here again), as HuntingSwan utilises a SumRandomDude plugin to great aplomb! These plugins are there to be used, and it still takes some great talent to integrate it with a project that has weight.
One of the reasons why I feel Somniloquy has weight, is that it's also rooted in the serious - notions of the inequality of balance in Hollywood, the necessity of being assertive, aggressive, passive and passive-aggressive in turn to tip the scale of power your way, and the bleak reality that women were trampled all over in this industry, and didn't seem to get their fair recompense.
I didn't manage to get a "good" ending, so I suppose my experience curved towards the "pessimistic" in this case. However, being the type to play a game once and embrace its ending, I enjoyed it as a cautionary tale. I can imagine that if you get the "good ending" it might be a little different? Only Heaven knows!
All in all, this is a fun, comedic romp of tête-à-tête tit-for-tatting, petty persuasion, and the struggle for power in a game where everything's fake, even the points. If this is any indication of other HuntingSwan games, then I must have more!
(Here's a video of me playing on stream:)