Summary
Dreams of Another is less a game and more an experience, one that lingers long after waking. While the visuals and ambient music create a haunting yet beautiful mood, the gameplay focuses on environmental storytelling and puzzle-solving. The smooth performance offers value for players interested in narrative variation. Even the flaws become part of the experience, reminding you that dreams themselves rarely conclude neatly. The world, though fragile and unstable, feels alive in a way that forces you to pay attention to the small details.
Developer- Q-Games
Publisher- Q-Games
Platforms- PlayStation 5 (Reviewed), Microsoft Windows
Review copy given by the Publisher
Dreams of Another is an adventure game that uses the basic foundation of third-person shooters to create a narrative-driven experience where bullets don’t destroy things. Dream of Another feels like a throwback to the PS3 era in many ways. The visual presentation of the game alone makes a strong first impression, as it’s all very abstract. There are PS5 Pro enhancements, and for those brave enough to immerse themselves in the dream landscapes, there are PSVR2 features as well.
You have not stumbled upon a gooning video, but you have entered the trans world of dreams of another. Dream of Another is a game that’ll make you think and forget as it whispers by in a wave of digital bubble wrap. There are various ways to play all on one Sony console. You’ve got the normal, and quite frankly, pointless flat-screen version, which is third-person.
On PSVR 2, you’ve got the first-person mode, which is exclusive to VR. It brings you closer to the world and really does sell the abstract illusions it throws at you. You traditionally aim your guns, but there’s no fancy reloading. It’s all automatic, and that’s fine.
This is a Christopher Nolan-style dream trip, not a military circle jerk. The controls in third-person mode are what sold me. You aim your gun with the iron sight and shoot, and it feels great. It’s a perfect reference to you painting the world with your eyes.
The game starts with a cold open, putting you in the boots of a soldier too cowardly to use his weapons. He dies, and then we get to the main menu. This is where you land when a dream ends. And it’s where a new one starts. That man in the bed is the man you play as, the man in the pajamas. Your guide is the soft soldier from the start, delivering words of nonsense. The longer you play, the more words of profound wisdom.
It really does capture the feeling of being in a dream where somebody could speak utter bollocks, but it makes sense to you inside that world. I found myself convinced the world would just make sense if I could pop every bubble and build it properly around me. Instead, after peppering a Ferris wheel with bullets, I was dragged back to the space between dreams to wonder where I’d go next. Like real dreams, they start to recur, and patterns emerge from the chaos.
Gameplay is mostly centered around blasting bubbles. However, your marksman skills are still put to some use when the mysterious auras show up, and they can be a fair challenge. You’re not going in half asleep, though. You’ve got your mate to help you, the scaredy sergeant. He is your upgrade guy, and that makes perfect sense. He’s decked out in weapons but lacks the stomach to use them. You trade him random stuff for his stuff. Forget about proper progress, except for the weird flow. You’ll forget the last stream as quickly as the next one starts.
In fact, to put this review together, I had to go back through my captures to remember what I’d actually been up to inside the game. It’s mostly popping the world. If I had to make a lazy comparison, it’s like a cross between PowerWash Simulator and the PS VA Deep Cut, Unfinished Swan, with that satisfying paint-the-world gameplay. The game also throws weird, deep questions at you, so don’t be surprised if you end up sitting there dribbling like a bag of kittens at 3:00 in the morning.
The presentation of Dreams of Another is something else. You’re brought into weird, wonderful dream skates that are nothing but blurs of bubbles, and it’s your job to pop them and bring them to life. It’s a treat for the eyes, and it all runs very well. I have seen some chatter online about the game using reprojection, and it’s fine. The only thing I’d say that lets it down is that sometimes, on clusters of bubbles further away, you can feel a slight sluggishness.
For a game where you’re mostly holding down the trigger, there’s the risk of having your ears dulled by constant machine gun fire. But that’s not the case here. It’s soft and, well, dreamlike. Even the way people speak is odd and out of place, and I would ordinarily criticize it, but here in Dreamland, it makes sense.
There are also different kinds of puzzles and stuff that happen. Once you calm the lost aura by, like, shooting more orbs or even like, the blue shadow of the objects, it will materialize. The lost aura cannot materialize just by shooting them themselves. You have to complete some puzzles to get them to come to life and progress through the story. Whenever you complete a lost aura and calm it down, it usually goes to the next sequence. Every sequence ends with you in bed and a start screen. To continue with the story, you will need to hit start, and then you will dream again. Dreams of Another offers a whole bunch of sequences, but there are probably about three chapters.
It’s about seven hours long, which felt a little long for the kind of game it is. There are only three main characters anyway, besides the man in pajamas and the wandering soldiers that the whole chapters are kind of centered around. I also found various other non-main characters that are throughout the world. They are all mostly voice-acted, and they talk extremely slowly. The biggest gripe with the game in general is just the way that they all talk.
Clearing out the space with the gun felt really cool at first, but the pixel cloud will start to kind of like form back unless you get the lost auras that will sometimes permanently clear the space. The game is all about figuring out what to shoot or what to interact with next to pave the way forward. Environments will dissipate around you when you’ve done something right; you will be somewhere else.
Sometimes it’s new, and sometimes it’s places you’ve been before, making you think you’re going in circles, but you’re not. You do pick objects, but that’s only to trade them to upgrade your rifle and run speed. None of which feels worthwhile. But none of it’s worse than the conversations that you’re forced to endure.
The voice acting is terrible, the writing is pretentious, and none of it is interesting, and it genuinely made me despise the existence of NPCs in this world. The graphics aren’t great, the audio just drones on and on, putting you to sleep, and the story is nonexistent. One of the major annoying parts was dealing with having to go back to the main menu and continue the journey; it’s confusing yet repetitive. Dream of Another is a warp in spacetime in a way that we’ve never seen before.
