Neopress
Set in 1970s Oregon, the player controls Aster Cross, a bicycle messenger for the Neopress newspaper. Suffering from insomnia, Aster gets an experimental treatment from a pharmacy. It gives him an unexpected ability: he becomes lucid in his dreams and can map the roads and places he discovers. While building this mental palace, he realizes his reality was never real: he was already dreaming before taking the treatment. A rabbit wearing a monocle appears every time he solves a puzzle, whether in a painting, on a television, in the sky, or in a reflection. Once all the puzzles in the mental palace are solved, the rabbit also appears in reality. At the end, he asks Aster to wake up. Aster wakes up, and the game restarts from the beginning.
The distorted architecture exists only in dreams and becomes increasingly warped as Aster sinks deeper into nested dreams. Each area discovered in his false reality is added to his dream, but distorted according to a Russian nesting doll logic. The dream deteriorates further if he dreams within a dream or discovers a setting he has never seen before.
The rabbit says “Wake up” not to Aster, but to the player. Maybe the real wake-up call is to close the game. Or to refuse the treatment.
The game isn’t over yet.