Thank you Gamers Gate for giving us this game to review!

Lylian is a girl with an extraordinary power: her dreams briefly become a reality.  Because of this ability, and her parent’s lack of understanding, she has been put in a mental facility.  All that she has to comfort her is Bob her possessed stuffed animal.  Bob is not your average teddy bear; he can go through air ducts to open doors for Lylian.

The game begins with the lights going out in the mental ward and Lylian finds that her sleeves are undone and her room door is open.  A shadowy figure is running away and she wants to find the one that helped her.  After a brief tutorial on the basic controls and attack moves, you’re left to explore the hospital on your own.

Like many side scrolling platform games, you can jump and attack with the WASD keys.  The sleeves from the straight jacket make excellent whip like weapons.  Lylian is also equipped with heavy duty boots that are perfect for stomping on rats.  Other enemies include rat boys, nurses, doctors and giant earth worms with tongues.

When you defeat an enemy, they release an orb that replenishes your energy.  The other power up in this game is jelly donuts.  Lylian loves the jelly more than the dough but she loves her jelly donuts regardless.  When both of her meters are full, Lylian can change her surroundings based on comic books that she reads.  One mode changes your enemies to butterflies and the second ability transforms the area to be underwater.   Who knows what new modes future episodes will offer.

Graphically Lylian is truly unique and the imaginative sequences are extremely colorful while the hospital scenes are bland and dull.  The artwork looks cell shaded at times and it’s hard to tell what’s in Lylian’s imagination versus (in-game) reality. The atmosphere and character development is well done.  There’s some entertaining dialogue between Lylian and other patients in the hospital.  Unlike her friends, the nurses, doctors, and other enemies all look the same.  There’s a lot of recycling happening here.

You can run Lylian in fullscreen or windowed mode.  The resolution is hard set to 800x600 so if you have a large monitor it won’t look very crisp.   When I exit out of the game some of my side bar gadgets get shifted out of place.

The spooky sound effects and ambient noises add to the creepiness of this game.  If you listen for it, there’s pretty piano music in the background. Unfortunately it’s drowned out by the noises of screaming enemies being whipped by your straight jacket sleeves.

While you’re smacking people around with your sleeves you won’t see any blood.  The doctors blow up and pop with confetti when you defeat them.  The only blood you’ll see in this game is from stomping on rats.  The language is pretty tame; the worst it gets is the word crap.

If you like horror movies and platform games Lylian may be right up your alley. Even with two difficulty levels you’ll only get a couple hours of play out of it.  There is a demo available; I wonder how long it is compared to the full game.  Fortunately, the five-dollar price tag compensates for the length of time you’ll enjoy it.  If you see it on sale, it\'s worth looking into.  It\'s a little too demented for my tastes though.