Dreams of Another (PS5/PSVR2) Review
Summary: A subversive, existential shooter for lovers of games as art and art house movies.
4
Everybody's looking for something
Dreams of Another is the Waking Life game I never thought I wanted.
It’s a surreal, existential meditation on the paradoxical nature of creation that gleefully upends genre conventions, with a simple mission statement: There is no creation without destruction.
It opens with a soldier in the midst of a tense battle, who can’t bring himself to pull the trigger on his gun. Eventually, this inaction becomes his undoing after he is cornered by the enemy and unable to defend himself.
After a gunshot rings out, the player awakens to find themselves in the stripped pyjamas of the game’s main protagonist. Armed with a machine gun and pockets full of hand grenades, you’re tasked with reconstructing an abstract dream world by blasting through the literal abstraction, with every shot slowly forcing the bubbles the world is constructed out of into more solid shapes and scenery.
It’s like a moving Monet painting; abstract and colourful. The perfect visual metaphor for how both our dreams and memories become blurrier over time, and recalling distant moments in our lives takes more effort over time.
As you navigate these metaphysical spaces, pushing back the abstraction that surrounds you by reconstructing the world one bullet at a time, you slowly piece together the fragmented memories and dreams of our protagonist as he struggles to find a way out of the strange, fragmented world he has become trapped in.
Dreams of Another does a wonderful job of feeling dreamlike, down to the construction and pacing, which at times is deliberately obtuse and inconsistent. You’ll end up having conversations with playground equipment, follow fish in an aquarium who are curious about the ocean, and fight boss battles against theme park rides that undo reality as they twirl and smash into the fragmented world around them.
Nothing is straightforward, nothing is what it seems. Levels can seemingly end on a dime, then you’re returned to the start screen to dive in again. You’ll hop through several different winding narrative threads about self-determination, the transitory nature of our lives, and the impact this has on the world around us that we often aren’t aware of.
It’s a thinker first, and everything else second.
And for all its abstract tinkerings and its occasional, a little too on-the-nose metaphors. I kind of love it.
Despite your need to shoot basically everything you see, it doesn’t feel like a violent game. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s weirdly meditative. While the solution to pretty much every problem is either shoot it or chuck a grenade in its general direction, the off-kilter narrative and interesting puzzle design help to stop Dreams of Another from ever feeling repetitive.
Each level also contains various odd collectables that you later trade with the wandering soldier in the opening in return for minor upgrades to your arsenal or dash stat, but, more often than not, he’ll hand you more grenades that let you blast larger areas of the map back into shape.
The presentation is solid. Expanded further by the ability to play it either as a third-person shooter on the TV or a first-person VR experience using the PSVR2.
Though it is fun to immerse yourself fully in the world of Dreams of Another and shooting with motion controls is far more engaging, the VR implementation is often inconsistent. The game frequently shifts into a third person when you’re talking to other characters, all of the cinematics jerk you back into a theatre mode, and several sections force you to play in third person regardless of whether you’re playing in VR or not.
There’s also a limited amount of physicality to the VR mode, with weapons being selected and reloading achieved with a button press rather than physical movements, which makes the VR mode feel like an afterthought rather than an integral part of the experience.
The sound design is also rock solid with a fittingly aetherial soundtrack and decent performances from its cast, comprising of everything from insane clowns with a penchant for collecting the wedding rings of divorcees, a family of Moles desperate to prove they can make it above ground, to the philosophical musings of inanimate objects.
Final Thoughts
Dreams of Another, much like the Richard Linklater movie it reminds me of, isn’t for everyone; it’s disjointed, abstract, and constructed in a way that is purposefully designed to confuse and, at times, frustrate.
However, if you’re the kind of person who has an appreciation for games as art and enjoys seeing genre conventions turned on their head to brilliant effect, Dreams of Another is one slice of philosophical gaming whimsy you won’t want to sleep on.