This game was originally covered as part of our Nindie Round Up series that sought to give coverage to a wider breadth of Switch eShop games beyond our standard reviews. In an effort to make our impressions easier to find, we're presenting the original text below in our mini-review format.

The cartoonish, dream-based Dreamwalker is an action-puzzler which was released on DSiWare back in 2011. It has you directing a chap through his dreams in order to reach the sun at the end of the stage by moving cloud blocks, navigating him through various hazards including alarm clocks and nightmares that will halt his progress.

Dreamwalker is another game that falls into the 'suitable for smartphones' category and lacks the substance to justify a full console release; it’s a fairly dull platform-puzzler that doesn’t really do anything new or inspired and feels awkward in its own skin.

It’s also time-based, with a giant ticker at the top of the screen marking how much time you have left. In fairness, this can lead to increasingly frantic gameplay at times as more hazards appear forcing you to quickly rearrange platforms or risk being transported back to the start of the stage, but it just isn’t that engaging overall. It takes a special kind of game to make simple level-based puzzle gameplay consistently fun and interesting and, unfortunately, Dreamwalker doesn’t cut the mustard.

The visuals are also dull, with a stock-sounding soundtrack and typical Saturday morning cartoon-style aesthetics that aren’t pleasant to look at for extended periods. This, unfortunately, leads to a package that dooms Dreamwalker to mediocre obscurity; it does what it does well enough to not be considered a terrible game, but the lack of anything particularly engaging or new makes it difficult to recommend for anything more than 15 minutes of mind-numbing entertainment.