Red Bow: Strange Dream Review — Strange and Sweet

A Short Walk Through A Dream

Reviewed on PC.Score: 8/10

I’ve played many RPG Maker games that failed at what Red Bow: Strange Dream did. Despite only being an hour-long game, it was able to linger in my mind long after I was done with it.

You play as Roh, a young woman who heads to bed and gets stuck in a dream world, trying to find her mother. Spirits are trapped in this world, unable to move on without finding peace, and Roh does her best to help them as she tries to wake up.

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Red Bow: Strange Dream — Official Trailer

Red Bow: Strange Dream

Release: December 12, 2025

Genre: Adventure, Casual, Indie

Developer / Publisher: Stranga Games / GrabTheGames

Platforms: PC — Steam, itch.io

Content note (from Steam): Depicts mild themes of suicide, self, and psychological harm.

Diving Deeper into the Dream

The Spirits who ask for your help lead you to different worlds within the dream, to strange yet beautiful places, where you have to find items and characters that lead you to where you need to go next. You’re always on your feet, going back and forth between the dream worlds.

Each place is connected to two ghosts whose stories are intertwined, but they haven’t connected because of their own guilt or misunderstandings. Tragically separated, hinging on the relationships between parents and their children, Roh mends the rifts between them and brings them together.

Perfectly Strange World

The world itself was fun to go through. The dream worlds are characteristically strange, like a slice of a road with an overgrown path that leads to an isolated cabin, or a dock with a captain’s ship that seems broken up into different parts of the captain’s life, and the lone convenience store where nothing else exists.

Dock and boat — Red Bow: Strange Dream

Each of these places is important to the spirits, and as such, represents what these places meant to them. It creates the perfect atmosphere when entering this unknown land.

A Few Issues Here and There

While the story is the main draw of Red Bow: Strange Dream, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, there were a few moments where I got stuck.

Roh reaches a blocked road where a spirit watches from above.

Roh examines a photo album inside a quiet, shadowy room.

The art style is beautiful, but sometimes it was hard to distinguish important items from the environment, and I got stuck on a puzzle and had to click everything to find the item I needed to progress.

The Reward of Inner Peace

As the final spirit was helped, and the game ended, I sat down in my chair and was left with a sense of peace myself. The game isn’t complicated in its gameplay or puzzles, but it uses them effectively to leave small hints for each reason why each spirit is stuck there, without lingering on it too long so that you spoil the surprise for yourself.

It’s a rewarding experience, and one that stuck with me for a few days afterward. It was able to get me to smile, even with a bittersweet ending, because the game makes you feel like you did something good.

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