Dreams of Another Review
Dreams of Another is an ambitious experiment that doesn’t live up to its potential.
Dreams of Another. Credit: Q-Games
Q-Games’ experimental third-person exploration game Dreams of Another is directed by multimedia artist Baiyon, director of PixelJunk Eden. The game builds itself around the philosophical theme "No Creation Without Destruction,” inverting typical shooter mechanics so that your bullets materialize and create the world rather than destroying it. While featuring genuinely gorgeous visuals, the rest of the execution struggles to match the game’s conceptual ambition.
The story follows two emotionally scarred characters: The Man in Pajamas and The Wandering Soldier. The soldier, who is psychologically unable to pull his weapon’s trigger, accompanies you as The Man in Pajamas through various dream sequences as you explore surreal stories laden with obvious symbolic meaning. A boy who is struggling with the idea of moving away from his small hometown. Two fish and an eel longing to escape an aquarium to the freedom of the ocean, despite not knowing what the ocean is and what awaits them there. A clown proud of his amusement park where all the rides are broken down. A man who considers having a robot carry on the artistic vision of his deceased father. As you explore each location, you also hear the thoughts and musings of non-sentient objects like doors and trees. There are also a handful of flashbacks where you see past events from the two protagonists’ lives.
Dreams of Another. Credit: Q-Games
While the thematic exploration of creation through destruction and finding meaning in life's choices is intellectually interesting, the actual narrative delivery falls flat. The dialogue suffers from what appears to be poor localization, with awkward phrasing that obscures rather than illuminates the philosophical points it's trying to make. Worse still, the voice acting is emotionless, stilted, and flat, sometimes sounding so artificial that I wondered if the developers generated the performances with AI. The game hinges on conveying deep emotion and philosophical meaning through character interactions, but when the human characters sound almost as robotic as the door or bench that just talked to you, the lifeless delivery undermines the entire experience.
The game tells these stories in bursts, jumping between them within an episode, which ends with a return to your bed and the title screen. This creates a stop-start rhythm that kills any momentum. Each scene feels disconnected from the last, and while that's intentionally dreamlike, it makes the game feel far longer than it is. The white particle erasure effect that plays at the end of each scene doesn’t help, because it takes way too long for something that happens so frequently. It’s especially irritating when a cutscene ends and the game returns control to you only to trigger that transition immediately.
Dreams of Another. Credit: Q-Games
The core gameplay loop involves shooting at the abstract, particle-filled environment to form coalescent objects and scenery; for this canvas, a machine gun, grenades, and a rocket launcher are your brushes—tools of destruction used here for creation. Areas start as hazy clouds of circles that resemble a bokeh effect, the blur in the out-of-focus parts of a photograph. As you shoot into these forms, particles shrink and rearrange into buildings, walls, characters, and anything else that might be in the scene. Occasionally, you run into “boss fights,” where an object’s aura becomes disturbed, and you have to shoot its weak points to have it return. These amount to target practice; there’s no danger of harm to your character.
Gameplay is initially satisfying in a way similar to Powerwash Simulator. Watching your actions reveal concrete shapes from formless clouds feels good. However, due to a lack of variation or evolution, the mechanic grows stale quickly. It’s made worse by repeatedly revisiting the same locations and revealing the same scenery. Perhaps having to manifest the same things over and over is intended to convey futility, but it doesn’t make for an engaging experience; the repetitive nature of both the gameplay and locations turns a novel experience into tedium.
Dreams of Another. Credit: Q-Games
Where Dreams of Another genuinely succeeds is in its visuals. The particle-based graphics create a world that resembles pointillist paintings coming to life, reminiscent of Georges Seurat's work. The soft-colored, impressionistic quality of the graphics produces a dreamlike atmosphere. The game also features full PSVR2 support, which I didn’t experience, but I imagine is stunning.
Dreams of Another feels like an art installation rather than a game, and for that, it’s far too long, even with its short playtime. Its philosophical ambitions and stunning visuals can't overcome the fundamental problems of repetitive gameplay, poor pacing, bad writing, and emotionless performances. I appreciate what Q-Games attempted here, but I see it as a failed experiment.
Dreams of Another is available on Steam and PlayStation 5.
Overall Score: 4/10
Played on: PS5
