Saving, reset cycles, and gameplay.

Hello! Well, first of all, this game is amazing. I started playing it with my girlfriend during this weekend and it's just the kind of game we needed, so I'm (we are) extremely happy with it. We really love this kind of "escape room" touch on it, the art is beautiful, and the overall quality of the components is just great.

I say all this to make clear that we are in love with the game, and that the following is not a critic but more like a note...

The thing is that, while we were playing the game, it all felt right, we started reading the rules on Saturday, and then during the whole Sunday we played the tutorial, mounted the first tiles of the Dream World, played 1 Slumber, and then we played another dream.

And once again, it all felt right... until the moment when we started to think "tomorrow is a working day, we should put this back in the box". This thought came to us in the middle of the dream, and then, knowing more about the game, I rechecked the rules for "saving the game". It was surprising to see in the rules that all the Sealed Cards were going back to the Influence Deck.

I kind of understand (especially after reading some other messages written in this forum) that this hard reset is intentional, and that by resetting you don't only get some benefits like getting back all the sealed cards or all your "hit points", but then you also get some disadvantages like starting from the awakening point, losing your active progress cards, your "money" and tokens, etc... this is all ok.

What didn't feel like ok, and this is the main thing that I want to say in this message (sorry for all the previous text), is that knowing about the reset of the sealed cards changed our gameplay. What I mean with this is that, while knowing that after finishing the dream we would stay in the Dream World and maybe play some other dream or slumber, we would be really careful about not sealing cards, and our strategy would be to use them just when necessary because we could need them in the future. But, after we knew about this reset, we started to use the effects that you get from some cards after sealing them (which are usually much more powerful), and this made the dream extremely easy to finish. The same applies to the objects, we just used the Intent given from some objects only because we knew that they were going to reset. This makes a huge difference when you play one dream but want to keep on playing (you'll play the dream in a more thoughtful way, with more care about strategy) or you play the same dream but want to "save the game" afterwards (you can just go "all in").

This didn't feel very rewarding... neither some of the Victory rewards after finishing the dream. What's the point on having as a reward something like "Unseal 3 cards" if you are going to Unseal all of them anyway when you save? . I can't understand that the reward of something that feels so "unique" as finishing a dream, suddenly feels "not so special" when you know that you would get it anyway if it's your last game of the day.