This surreal and aptly named shooter commences in a war zone, revealing a soldier faced with enemy troops advancing on their position. As they draw closer, they find themselves too terrified to even pull the rifle’s trigger. Upon being captured the screen fades to black just as their inner monologue brands themselves a failure. What use is a soldier who’s too afraid to shoot? This is just one of many theoretical questions Dreams of Another poses to players during its 4–5 hour duration, with a running theme being “No Creation Without Destruction.” Perhaps a sense of usefulness and purpose, too, depending on your interpretation.
Compatible with the PSVR2, it’s suitably dream-like and hazy visually, featuring a distinct art style where everything is rendered using small pixel-like shapes instead of polygons. Often environments are distorted or cluttered by floating particles, which must be re-materialised (brought into focus) by firing a rifle, a la a typical third-person shooter. Paths are often blocked too, providing another reason to get trigger happy.
A man in striped pyjamas is our protagonist, finding himself in small abstract and disjoined dreamscapes. Within these locations are citizens and sentient everyday objects, conversing using either slowed speech or robot-like synthesised voices. This gave a rough first impression, fooling me into thinking that the voice acting is genuinely terrible, only to eventually realise that it’s intended to play into the game’s dreamlike nature.
In this world, inanimate objects are often either confused or miffed about their intended purpose, such as an empty decorative treasure chest in an aquarium, or the concept of plastic flowers. Some sentiments are curiously comical, such as a faulty change machine regularly receiving abuse for counting coins incorrectly. Around 200 sentiments exist in total, which can be replayed between chapters, acting as impromptu collectables.
Random items can also be found within the environments. Continuing the theme of usefulness (albeit loosely) they’re mostly items that could be considered junk, such as a blunt knife and a lost button. Handing these over to the soldier will increase your ammo or dash duration, with a few more weapons added to the arsenal over time, helping to re-materialise locations quicker.
The means of progressing usually involves a combination of finding and talking to characters, shooting blue orbs known as auras, or simply interacting with everything in an environment. A couple of ‘line of sight’ puzzles feature too, but literally just a couple. A typical scene lasts just a few minutes, and it’s surprisingly easy to get into the swing of things.
Rather than feature traditional stages, Dreams of Another instead recycles a handful of locations, either gradually becoming larger or featuring a different situation, ergo more or different people to converse with. Each has its own storyline thread, such as a theme park owner looking to sell his dilapidated rides to fund new ones, a robot being taught to paint, and a trio of fish looking to escape from an aquarium after hearing of an inlet. Recurring characters include a clown, a child eager to hear the town square’s piano being played, and a family of moles. Dialogue is often truncated, again tying into the premise of being inside a dream.
My experience with Dreams of Another went from a rough first impression, to enjoying its weirdness – the random items, especially – and eventually being reasonably engaged once its cast of characters and sense of progression had been established. Around the three hour mark it seemed that things were about to wrap up, which would have left me reasonably content with its mix of philosophical thinking and weirdness, only for it to then plod along for another couple of hours, reusing locations and going on a tangent by introducing robots before concluding with a slow-paced, dialogue heavy, ending.
Perhaps the final hour or so went over my head, but in the end, I didn’t get much out of Dreams of Another. It has moments of lucidity that captivate ever so briefly, only for tedium to surface after being thrown back into its increasingly overfamiliar locations. It’s visually pleasing, but at the same time, also quite samey due to the way the environments are rendered. That and the fact that paths and locations are closed off, as if floating in a void. This doesn’t do much for exploration either, preferring to keep players on a narrow path.
I’m glad Dreams of Another exists – in a way, it’s a modern take on the offbeat indies Sony pushed heavily during the PS3 era, such as Journey and Flower – yet I feel like I’m only going to remember it for its distinct visual style rather than any of its themes, or even its core message.
Q-Games’ Dreams of Another is out now on PS5 and PC.