Review: Dreams is one of the most innovative games you'll ever play
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Dream Surfing, a few negatives and a verdict
Not your cup of tea? Try Dream Surfing
As fun as Dream Shaping is, it’s not going to be to everyone’s taste. I can see more than a few players checking in, taking one good look at the jaw-dropping amount of tutorials and then checking back out. That’s completely valid too, because Dream Shaping is just one half of the experience that Dreams offers.
Every game players create can be published, becoming instantly playable to everyone else in the Dream Surfing menu. Here, you can explore the staggering variety of games, movies, photos and music others have created. These Dreams range anywhere from kooky experimental videos to fantastically detailed games, and all of them load in practically no time at all. Games themselves come in many different genres - platformers, first-person shooters, racing games, stealth games and hilarious knockoffs.
Media Molecule themselves have created a couple of playable games as well, of course. Chief among these is Art’s Dream, a movie-length game that takes players through three different game genres as they follow the story of a mopey musician. It shows off everything Dreams can be in a pretty cool way, and players can snag unique game assets as collectibles, too. It’s not as interesting as the developers’ many other smaller Dreams, but it’s there as a default story mode.
Dream Surfing makes Dreams feel like a 150-in-one game, with an absolutely mind-boggling wealth of content to play through at any given time. I’ve fought in the Australian war against emus (based on a true story), flown planes, driven cars, unravelled a Silent Hill conspiracy and wrecked cities as an adorable Kaiju. That’s not even including all the fun knockoffs you’ll find - with multiple recreations of Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, Metal Gear Solid, Star Wars and Overcooked games available to play.
While some of these knockoffs are just cheap imitations of the real thing, most are incredibly amusing to play through at least once. The rest take on different perspectives that are actually pretty interesting to see. They’re all made by fans after all, so it’s a lot of fun to play through their unique vision of the games they love.
Let’s talk about negatives
While Dreams dazzles at just about everything it tries to do, it does have its shortcomings - which are mostly dependent on what kind of player you are. If you’re a creator, you’ll have to put in the work to create something truly impressive. Dreams has tutorials and other systems in place to make your creative process as simple and worry-free as possible, but it’ll still be a daunting experience for any new player.
On Dream Surfing, the basic quality of textures in Dreams have an - appropriately so - painterly quality to them. They’re distinctly fuzzy, which often doesn’t translate well to full levels. The things players create range from photorealistic to downright awful, depending on how much time they spent learning how to create. That can translate to a wildly inconsistent gameplay experience for Dream Surfers. Personally, I loved all the kooky, messy projects as much as I loved playing the fleshed-out, visually impressive ones.
Verdict
I can’t imagine the challenges Media Molecule had to overcome to get a game as mechanically complex as this to be even slightly user-friendly, but I can imagine why it took them seven years to do so. Every aspect of this game is so fleshed out and perfectly crafted, to the point players can make the most professional-looking setpieces with the simplest tools available.
Even if you don’t own it, Dreams is going to be a game you’ll hear about years down the line. Media Molecule has promised to add online multiplayer and PlayStation VR support soon - so it’s only going to grow in potential. Players are already creating spectacular things all the time, which is just exemplary of the level of power this game has to offer.
Dreams is a machine powered by its community’s colourful imagination, built upon the most accessible game creation tools I have ever had my hands on. It delivers on its name and then some, offering you the ability to create the game of your dreams with little to no limitations - besides your own imagination and time.
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