Dreams of Another

During my time as a reviewer, I have played many strange games, mainly because I love exploring and trying out obscure and "weird" indie games. This is often where the greatest gaming experiences are to be found, and I would say that Dreams of Another is among the strangest games I have tried, as I actually find it a little difficult to understand.

Dreams of Another is a shooter created by multimedia artist Tomohisa Kuramitsu, who also goes by the stage name "Baiyon". Although he also creates visual art, workshops, and music (he has contributed a couple of tracks to Little Big Planet 2 and all the music for this game), he is probably best known in our part of the world for his work on PixelJunk Eden 2.

Dreams of Another... The first thing you notice when you start the game is its unique visual style. I can't think of any other game that looks like this. It uses a technology called "Point Cloud Technology", which consists of thousands of particles of different sizes, shapes, and transparency, and when placed close together, they can form different objects, such as houses, trees, people, or whatever the game designer wants. There are probably many advantages to this technology, but one of the most obvious ones in Dreams of Another is that you can easily manipulate the environment depending on how the player interacts with it. We'll come back to that in a moment.

As I said at the beginning, Dreams of Another is a strange game. I am not afraid to admit that for large parts of the game I had no idea what was going on in front of my eyes, but I will try to explain a little here. You take on the role of "The Man in Pyjamas" (literally, a man in pyjamas) and the action takes place across four different abstract dreams.

You experience the dreams in small fragments in what seem like random order, as you often jump from one dream to another. Dreams are often strange, and so are these dreams. Among other things, they are about a clown who wants to sell his amusement park with worn-out rides that no longer work, about three little fish looking for a way out of a large aquarium as they have heard that there is something called "the sea" on the other side, and about the son of an artist who wants to recreate his father's life's work using only robots, which leads him to ask himself what art really is.

The dreams often start with shapeless clouds of particles that you cannot move through. In addition to your pyjamas, you are equipped with a machine gun (and later also with grenades and a bazooka), and by shooting into the particle clouds that surround you, you begin to reshape your surroundings. The particles move, changing shape and size, and in this way houses, trees, carousels, and much more appear. In other words, you create by shooting and "destroying".

As you shoot away the particle clouds and a tangible world appears, you can begin to move around and talk to different people. You can also choose to listen to what the various things have to say (yes, dead things have thoughts and opinions); for example, there may be a post box that is tired of people putting letters in it without asking first, and the post box hints faintly that this may be abuse. I also encountered a dying mole whose last wish was to drink champagne in a jacuzzi. Yes, dreams are sometimes quite strange.

So you run around in your pyjamas, armed to the teeth, and everywhere you go you are followed by a pacifist soldier who thinks he is useless. You're not much of a soldier if you can't pull the trigger, and he may have a point there. However, by talking to him, you get more grenades and more ammunition for your bazooka, as he obviously doesn't need them.

As you may gather from the above, this seems rather peculiar, and it can be somewhat challenging to comprehend the overall concept. It may well be that others can make sense of all this, and it may be me who is unable to think abstractly enough, but I felt like I was missing an entire narrative layer. What is Baiyon trying to say here? What is his point with these abrupt and abstract dreams?

The gameplay itself is extremely simple; you shoot at these particle clouds to create space and shape the surroundings, you talk to the clown, the fish, the soldier, and other characters, and you solve very simple puzzles. After 5-7 minutes, the dream suddenly ends and you are sent on to another fragment of a completely different dream. And so it continues. After the first 5-10 minutes of playing the game, you have seen everything it has to offer in terms of gameplay. It therefore quickly becomes monotonous, and once the joy of shooting at these particle clouds wears off (it's pretty cool at first), there isn't much excitement or entertainment left if, like me, you also lose interest in the story. Towards the end of the game, after about 8 hours, I simply begged for it to stop as I'd had enough.

Dreams of Another also supports the PlayStation VR2 headset, so I had to dig it out of the back of the closet. When playing in VR, you can choose between two different VR modes: third-person (as in the flat-screen version), where you play with your DualSense controller, and first-person, where you play with the PS VR2 Sense controllers. This version is far more immersive, but in both modes, you are unfortunately taken out of the VR experience, as cutscenes are not played in true VR, but simply on a screen inside the headset. It's a bit disappointing, and the game constantly switches between VR modes and this window where a cutscene is played as if it were on your TV. It's not really good.

I usually like "artsy" games that try to do something visually different from what we normally know and here Dreams of Another hits the mark. The visual side is completely unique, at times downright beautiful, and at other times just fun, seductive, and very, very different.

That said, I simply cannot figure out what Baiyon is trying to say with this game. What is happening in front of me makes almost no sense to me. How do the four stories about a clown who wants to sell a series of defective amusement park rides to a multinational company fit together with fish who love light shows and dream of a life out in the sea? I can't figure it out.

I've also realised that this is probably some kind of art. Some get it, some don't. And even though I consider myself someone who is good at interpreting art and who loves quirky and mysterious games, Dreams of Another goes over my head. This is also reflected in my score, combined with extremely simple gameplay, so it may well be that others think it's absolutely fantastic and has a deep and beautiful narrative, and that's fine too. As with so much other art, it's entirely up to the individual to interpret what they see, and this just wasn't for me.