The Dream Machine is the first claymation game I've seen since The Neverhood. It's a classic point-and-click graphic adventure, implemented in Flash; the first chapter is freeware, but payment is required for access to the full game. Only two chapters are up so far, although the third is supposed to be completed this month, and the fifth and final in August 2011.
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There's nothing unusual about the UI; click on everything, items in inventory can be used with each other and with clickable objects in the scene. Mousing over the scene reveals interactable objects.
The game begins with you on a desert island, but once you solve the few puzzles there, you wake up -- in a nearly-empty apartment you've just moved into with your pregnant wife. The usual kinds of puzzles -- none too obscure or irrational -- ensue. It seems that the owner's father was a dream experimenter, and your dream (and a disturbing dream on your wife's part) may be a product of further dream experimentation. Though this is no Amnesia, it's clear that there's a degree of darkness to the story, and it's certainly not in a jocular, Lucasarts mold.
Its crisp, well-written without infelicities that sometimes creep into adventure games from non-native English speakers, and while it's not beautiful, the claymation is pleasant and smooth. All in all, it's a nice contribution to the engoing renaissance of the adventure game.
The Dream Machine was a 2011 IGF nominee in the Excellence in Visual Art category.
Slowness
Is there a rule that a certain number of otherwise interesting adventure games must be crippled by embarrassingly slow interaction?
I first noticed this with Hotel Dusk, which had an interesting art style and lead-in, but became more and more frustrating as most of the time spent playing the game was taken up in crawling around a low-detail 3D hotel.
Similarly, I got fed up with the Dream Machine, not so much because it was bad, as because every single interaction was so tremendously drawn out - walking across a room feels like watching Lawrence of Arabia, and puzzles you can solve in a second (like rearranging the pieces of a burnt note) are made tedious by ham-handed interaction.
I know this isn't necessary - interaction wasn't slow in the old LucasArts games I've seen, for example, and Machinarium had some issues, but waiting for your characters to cross the screen wasn't one of them.
Claymation
The characters are actually 3D-animated, see here: http://dreammachinegame.blogspot.com/2009/11/character-generation.html
Regardless of technology, the game is so far quite good. Actually, it's even more cool that they could pass their 3D for real clay.