Dreams of Another Review | Guns, Pajamas, and Introspective Philosophy
Dreams of Another splashed onto the scene earlier this year with an eye-catching and delightfully odd trailer included in the Sony State of Play that aired back in February. The trailer showcased a man wearing pajamas firing a gun at some multicolored bubbles that would create structures around him, talking doors, and other peculiarities. Fast forward 8 months, and the game has officially been released, and it’s a hard game to nail my thoughts down on. Buckle up because this is a weird one.
Gameplay and screenshots of Dreams of Another might lead you to believe that the game is a third-person shooter, and while that is correct in a sense, it is a very different type of third-person shooter than I was expecting. In the game, you control the character known as “The Man in Pajamas,” and you are dropped into these surrealist levels that initially appear as nothing more than a cloud of colorful spheres. You are given a submachine gun, and as you shoot your surroundings, objects materialize before you, like buildings, benches, amusement park rides, and more. Occasionally, there will be these bouncing blue orbs floating around the environment, and if you land enough shots on those, they will explode and clear/form a localized area in the level.
The shooting mechanics in Dreams of Another feel solid in execution, but their implementation is fairly simplistic. The machine gun you start the game with has unlimited ammo, so rather than feeling like a tool for precisely shooting at specific targets, it ends up feeling more like a water hose, where you drop in and start spraying everywhere to form your surroundings, allowing you to explore and talk to NPCs or interact with objects.
As the game unfolds, you unlock the ability to use grenades and a rocket launcher, both of which have a finite amount of ammo. As you clear out the environment in a given level, you will also come across “Odds and Ends” which are bits of seemingly unimportant objects cast aside by people, such as a button to a shirt, a drained battery, a shard from a broken pot etc. These items can be given to a character known as “The Wandering Soldier”, and by doing this, you will be given ammo for the grenades and rocket launcher, as well as occasionally getting an upgrade. I say ‘occasionally’ because most of the time, when I would give The Wandering Soldier an item (or allow him to pick one at random), he would make a brief comment, and that was the end of the conversation. When I did receive an upgrade, it was usually only to unlock the ability to sprint and to extend the amount of time I could spend sprinting before getting tired. So while there is some form of progression, the system isn’t very straightforward in how you interface with it, and it also just feels a bit underbaked in the actual abilities and upgrades you unlock.
This lack of depth or simplicity in the actual mechanics starts to lead to a nagging feeling of repetition as you play further into the game. Dreams of Another took me around 6 hours to finish, and outside of a few instances where you solve a spatial awareness puzzle involving orienting several objects to line up properly or shooting specific blue floating objects, the bulk of that run time is spent blasting the environment and listening to objects speak to you or watching a cutscene involving a few characters. Characters that often speak with a very flat tone of voice and speak very slowly. These factors combine in a way that feels like the game is a bit needlessly drawn out, even at a relatively short 6-hour runtime.
As you approach certain objects, The Man in Pajamas is able to sense the feelings of these objects, which appear in the game as “sentiments”. For example, you may walk up to a door on a building that will say something along the lines of “It must be lonely being a door to a house no one lives in”. These sentiments are oftentimes philosophical in nature, which usually pose some sort of question or thought. As you play, certain characters will take form as well, and these characters drive forward the plot of the game, which is spread across four different substories.
The wider narrative in Dreams of Another deals with artistry and expressing oneself, along with a central theme of “There is no creation without destruction”. While it’s easy to describe the game in this way, I found experiencing the game’s narrative to be quite difficult. There are moments where this core theme bubbles to the surface with some poignancy, paired with an interesting gameplay moment or a one-off line of dialogue, but much of the game’s philosophical musings I found a bit dense and directionless.
The structure of the game also hampers the enjoyment of the overall narrative. I mentioned before that the game’s story takes place over four substories. How this works in-game is that you will be dropped into the first story, one about a child who wants to hear the town piano play once more before their family moves away. You play for a few minutes up to a certain moment, such as talking to a specific NPC, and then the dream world fades away, and you are teleported to a different substory following a clown that serves as a caretaker for broken-down amusement park rides. Then, after playing for another few minutes, the world once again fades away, but this time, rather than going to the next story, you are taken back to the main menu for the game. Once you hit “start game” again, you are back to the first story to play a bit more, and as the game goes on, you are constantly teleported between different stories and kicked out to the menu of the game. Perhaps this was done to inject a bit of variety into the gameplay or environments the player explores, but the constant start and stop nature, the robotic performances of the characters, combined with the overall story being a bit hard to parse, made for a narrative that was hard to engage with and ultimately wasn’t very satisfying in the end.
One area where all of these disparate elements come together is in forming a “dreamlike” tone. Dreams of Another embodies the meaning of “dreamlike” possibly more than any other game I have ever played. From the way the game transitions between stories, to the odd cadence of how characters speak, to the abstract concepts and visual design, it truly resembles the feeling of falling asleep and picking up in the middle of some foggy dream scenario. The music was also a particular highlight in this way. The music is very soothing and cyclical, using what sounds like synthesizers, piano, and xylophone-esque instruments. It reminded me of a soundtrack that would have been born during the sixth generation of consoles, like the PlayStation 2 or original Xbox.
Speaking of the visual presentation, this is probably the aspect of Dreams of Another I was most impressed with. Using a system the developers at Q Games refer to as “Point Cloud Rendering”, everything in the game is essentially made of these tiny particles. These particles (as much as I can gather) are blown up and separated, giving them the abstract circular appearance. This reminded me of the bokeh effect that objects have when they are viewed through a camera lens and are very out of focus. And as you shoot objects in the environment, the objects and characters are essentially “focused” and brought together, forming identifiable shapes and structures. This interesting rendering technology combines with vibrant color usage and interesting level design concepts into a striking and unique visual identity.
Technically speaking, I did not run into any glaring technical problems during my playtime. The framerate was consistently solid, even if there was a lot of visual noise and effects happening on screen. The game didn’t crash at all during my playtime, and any bugs I may have experienced were minimal and unobtrusive. So not much to report here other than a good job.
After all that, I still find myself torn over my thoughts on Dreams of Another. On the one hand, it’s a game that has an incredibly unique visual identity, it nails the dreamlike tone its name alludes to, and while simple, the gameplay is serviceable if a bit repetitive. On the other hand, a large part of the experience is the narrative, which I found to be hard to appreciate, bolstered by several design decisions from structure to dialogue and upgrade systems that are just confusing. If the goal was to create a third-person shooter that defies most conventions of the genre, then I think that is wholeheartedly a mission accomplished. However, as I sat watching the credits to the game, I felt like I didn’t have that much fun with the game at the end of the day.
Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion that the game wasn’t exactly to my liking, but I can appreciate the artistry and the sheer fact that a game like this was able to be created and released. While I found the narrative a bit hard to grasp, if you are the type that loves stories revolving around the struggle of expression and the role of art in everyday life, I think you will find a lot to like here. I think if you are looking for a shooter that will test your skills and get your blood pumping with dreamy action set pieces, this isn’t that type of game. Dreams of Another is available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation VR2, and PC via Steam. A review code was provided by the publisher.
