The lovely scenery of the titular island greets you on every slide of Anacapri: The Dream. Not bad subject matter to work with. Made up of beautiful beaches, quaint towns, charming stores and great sea views, it has remarkably good genes. The game is made up of thousands of photographic depictions of actual locations, which offers a wonderful opportunity to forget the story and puzzles and just explore. And with a good 50-60 hours of gameplay, the gamer will have a lot of time to get acquainted with this island.

While Anacapri may be a dream location, the game's subtitle is meant to be taken quite literally. It seems, in fact, that you are in a dream for most of the game. When in the dream world, the storyline revolves around a missing obsidian disk on the present day island. You play as Dr. Nico N, an expert in ancient civilizations who is brought in to help find the disk. In real life, your character is better described as an expert on the psychology of dreams, as this appears to be the main line of the research he is pursuing. Other characters from the real world take on different roles which are ultimately meant to be symbolic and self-actualizing in the end, helping our character to come to a greater understanding of himself.

But back to that disk — it has quite the history, having appeared and disappeared at various times over the course of more than 3000 years. All manner of powerful men have wanted to possess it and its strange powers. Where many of them believed it would bring them glory and power, most of the current islanders feel that all the disk brings is bad luck and misery, and a number of them, fearing it is soon to be found again, have decided to flee before destruction rains down on them.

And that is just the start of this incredibly lengthy game.

The story itself is made up of equal parts fantasy and reality. While in the dream world, characters from Nico’s real life make appearances, sometimes as individuals who lived in the 19th century. Others become supernatural figures, handing out wisdom or acting as keepers of sacred information. All in all, the storyline is quite busy with characters and symbols to figure out, some of which are clear and others whose metaphorical relevance went right over my head. I just can’t say the story worked for me, becoming too outlandish and hard to get into. Maybe it's the lack of exposition before certain characters or plot points are introduced, which makes their presence less than believable. Maybe. But that issue certainly isn't alone in creating this dysphoria.

The graphics themselves are beautiful, but for some reason they seem to be tad grainer than in the preview version I played. I suspect this has to do with disk space and compression issues, and may perhaps be limited to the North American retail version. Unlike the game's predecessor, A Quiet Weekend in Capri , there are lots of extra little flourishes added here and there to give the static nature of this slideshow game a little pizzazz: signs blink with neon lights, water ripples, and plenty of other animations add a nice dimension to the graphic design. But even without the bells and whistles, such lush source material has a natural ability to speak to the soul of a traveller. You feel so immersed that you want to shop along the avenues or grab a coffee from the café. This is the next best thing to being there.

The game's point-and-click interface is generally solid, allowing intuitive and easy movement through the game's many nodes. Right-clicking provides access to a variety of options, including the inventory and game map. The map is indispensable. There are so many roads, trails and pathways to wander that you'll probably roam aimlessly around at times until you eventually realize you are very lost. Luckily, a quick scan of the map lets you know where you are. Better yet, the addition of a jump feature is another savvy touch that allows you to instantly move to locations you have already visited. These locations are often quite a distance from each other. To have backtracked all those spaces would have been very frustrating.

Not only is there a huge amount of territory to cover and explore — a real surprise in an indie game like this — there are a lot of puzzles to solve. None of which I would call easy. Most involve exploration, interacting with different characters, picking up items and learning stories and trying to piece them all together. With enough time and willpower, most people will be able to do this. For some, however, the difficulty of a number of challenges combined with the breadth of exploration is going to mean not finishing the game. Of course, all games have qualities that appeal to us personally and some players will revel in these exact attributes, while others will hate them. I can see people either really liking this game, committed to solving it over the long haul, or giving up and throwing in the towel. The only other commercially available game that I can think of that comes close to its length and difficulty is Riven, though in most other respects the two are worlds apart.