Fashion Dreamer Review - Not Very Style Savvy

Fashion queen Coco Chanel had a motto: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off". It means that people tend to overdress and over-accessorise, and that by removing one feature, the rest oꦇf your outfit will stand out, drawing attention to what remains while looking classy and minimalist. Unfortunately, Fashion Dreamer ♊takes that advice a little too literally, taking the mannequin of Style Savvy and, rather than trussing it up with new features, strips it bare.

Dress-up games are a highly underrated genre. I say this because it would be very easy for someone who doesn't play a lot of them to pick up Fashion Dreamer, bounce off it, and tell you it's not very good. But you wouldn't exactly learn a lot of things this way. With my fair share of experience in the genre (moving from Barbie Fashion Designer through Monster High: New Ghoul in School, then onto Style Savvy itself), I was fuꦑlly expecting Fashion Dreamer to be the modern evolution the genre needed. Instead, it feels frozen in time, wanting to be relevant but with no ideas on how to make tha꧋t stick.

Fashio💮n Dreamer is ꦯdeveloped in part by Syn Sophia, who made Style Savvy, generally considered the peak of the genre.

In a way, Fashion Dreamer is like an old star dressing itself up in Gen Z fashion, trying to look youthful but only succeeding🐻 in showing its age. You spend most of the g♉ame wandering around empty hallways that look like the sort of thing Mark Zuckerberg shows off to stifled laughter as he talks up the potential of the metaverse. Everything is cold and hollow, a lifeless clone of fashion sims of days gone by.

This is amplified by your role in the game. You're not a fashion designer as is typical for the genre, or even a model. Instead, you are an influencer whose goal is to gain followers. It’s a fairly vapid ambition in general, but when paired with an almost total lack of narrative cohesion, the whole venture seems pointless. You can unlock new 'cocoons' as you gain followers, but this mainly changes the shades of grey in your metaverse prison to those of pink or yellow. Occasionally rooms are dressed up with a sense of personality, but these are rare and random, and not enough to give you any sense of place.

I tried to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:dress up as Taylor Swift in the game, but the lack of options left me wanting

There's not much sense of progression apart from the levelling system. You unlock clothes mostly by chance - you can 'like' outfits worn by NPCs or the ghosts of other players who haunt your bland corridors and steal their outfits, and there's a storefront that rotates too. But there's nothing to save up for, you just take the lot then come back later. There's a strange gacha bingo system, but there are no microtransactions so this is just drawn out RNG for the sake of it.

Finally, we come to the clothes themselves. There are some excellent items in the game, and thousands of combinations (once you build up your fairly random wardrobe) that can be paired up creatively. But in a major sin for a game like this, all of the dresses are either bland and flat or huge poofy ball gowns that even a Disney Princess would think was a little much. It's also disappointing that a sizable chunk of the items are gendered. Not even typical things like men not being able to wear these horrendous dresses - it took me three leather jackets before I found one women were allowed to wear.

Oddly, it's not so much in dressing yourself up where you get to stretch your creativity, but in building your display room. This is a place unique to you that you can unlock furniture and other accessories for, and with limits on what you can buy and when, this is where you make more decisions rather than mindlessly grabbing everything on the rack, wearing different combos to boost your level, then continuing to move forward on the metaverse treadmill, going nowhere.

Fashion Dreamer was never going to be a Game of the Year candidate, however it did have the tools to be a favourite game for many. On a purely technical level it runs smoothly (as smoothly as games ever do on Switch), but with its aimless story, lack of depth, oddly colourless world, and misguided focus on influencer culture means it finds itself as one of 2023's worst dressed instead.