Dreams of Another is just about the most confounding game I have ever played. There is no creation without destruction, says the game, so you use an assault rifle to shoot the world back together from the clouds of bubbles around you. Meanwhile, you’re following the footsteps of a mole who dies once you get there, picking up random engagement rings or other stuff off the floor to give to a soldier who can’t shoot a gun, who tends to reward you with some grenades. Every detail from every angle in this game is weird. Listen, I’m King Weird – I reviewed and enjoyed Blippo+ in the last few months – but this? This has gone straight through weird and come out the other side – into bad.
I’ll start with the visuals. Striking in both positive and negative ways, the clouds of bubbles coming together as you shoot them is undeniably very pretty. Unsurprisingly, this is what initially drew me to the game, that and the whole “no creation without destruction” ethos. I mean, what’s not to like about marvelling at pretty visuals whilst a slightly artsy and heady narrative plays out. Plus, it’s made by Pixeljunk, who have made some exceptional games throughout the years, incredibly playable and unique masterpieces like Pixeljunks Eden and Shooter, so no doubt they would get some interesting ideas here. But, the problem is, there aren’t any beyond that first thought.
You shoot clouds of bubbles, it takes shape as an object, a building, a fence, whatever. Then you do it again. It’s not just the environment that needs to be fixed. It’s also people, so everyone you speak to is also made out of little floating particles which means two things: one, they don’t look convincingly person-like, and; two, means you can pass your gun through them when you’re in VR and they warp around it, which is fun for a minute or so.
Sure, there’s floating, spiky balls of white that fly around and, if you shoot those enough, they’ll break and restore the environment around them. But, they move around at random seemingly, usually away from things I need restoring, so I’m better off using one of the 18 grenades I’m carrying. Occasionally there’s something a bit different, like a ferris wheel comes loose and you shoot the cars, one by one, to stop it, or a circle (?) rolls around on the floor but otherwise behaves exactly like a spiky white ball. The only way of interacting with anything in this game other than shooting/grenading it, is talking to it.
People will tell you their secrets or desires, or why they’re here, or explain about moles or something, something that usually means very little to you because you don’t know how it’s relevant. At all. Objects will tell you about their experience being objects, you’ll stand there and blink confusedly, then you move on to more wall shooting. Since you spend all your time reconstituting the environments with your gun, the wonder you initially felt at everything taking shape doesn’t make it past the first 30 minutes.
Now, I could forgive the light or poorly considered gameplay if there was an engaging narrative, but the way Dreams of Another progresses is completely unbelievable. You spend the first couple of hours not only shooting environments back together, but repeatedly shooting the same environments back together over and over again. There is a scene with moles climbing a wall in a sewer that I think I saw five separate times, and I had to shoot it all back together each time and sit there whilst they climbed the wall again.
When a scene ends, all the particles float upwards, which looks pretty cool the first time, but quickly becomes a joke as you complete scenes that are twenty seconds long with two lines of dialogue you’ve already heard in a place you’ve been to before. And it often cuts back to the main menu so you can see a person lying in a bed and select the option to continue. This menu changes depending how far into the game you are, which is presumably why it cuts back to it so you can see it, but it’s incredibly clumsy and happens so often that by the time something significant enough to matter has changed on the menu, you’ve probably clicked back into the game before you notice. Assuming you haven’t already just turned it off.
Dreams of Another is the least narratively accessible game I’ve ever played. It takes an hour or so for a hint of a thread connecting the scenes you’re sitting through, and the entire time it feels like the opening minutes of a game where you don’t have a clue what’s happening yet. On top of that, it’s also the least immersive game you could play, with scenes ending by melting upwards abruptly, the constant cuts to the menu, and some of the worst voice acting you have ever experienced. I don’t know, sometimes it sounds like they’re trying to speak slowly like they’re in a surreal dream, but some of them, including the very first voice you hear, just don’t work whatsoever.
Maybe you could play in VR, that’s more immersive right? No, you’ve fallen for my rhetorical trick! Instead, you have cutscenes play out in a window in front of you, though at least they’re in 3D even though they warp when you move your head around. You also get some pretty poor controls as well, with you picking things up by walking over them and interaction generally being fiddly. The gun has 100 rounds in a mag, unlimited ammo, and automatically reloads itself when empty with no input from you whether you’re in VR or not, unless you want to reload early. It may as well be a wizard staff.
