Dreams of Another review

Video games habitually let us throw the winning touchdown, save civilizations, or wield godlike powers. What they rarely offer is the chance to explore the subconscious without conventional tasks or goals. You might have reconnoitered alien landscapes while burdened with colonial chores, but there’s a good chance you haven’t waded through tangled memories without the nagging pressure of objectives. Sadly, when games depict dreams, they’re often not all that dreamlike.

Q-Games’ Dreams of Another tackles this premise head-on, plunging players into a surreal world. Instead of leading you down a tidy, linear path, the game invites you to explore spaces that exist in the human mind. Consciousness is rendered in a pointillistic visual style that produces an experience both enigmatic and beautiful.

At times, Dreams of Another feels as much like an interactive art installation as a traditional video game. So, if you’re looking for clear storytelling and familiar objectives, you might be bewildered or bored. This is for those willing to surrender to dream logic, even if that logic doesn’t add up.

Living in an Immaterial World

The deliberately ambiguous plotline focuses on two characters. The first protagonist is the Wandering Soldier, whose orders from a superior officer serve as a basic tutorial. The soldier’s inability to pull the trigger seems to comment on our instinct for violence shaped by decades of game design. But Dreams of Another complicates this with a mantra repeated throughout: “No Creation Without Destruction.”

That’s precisely what the Man in Pajamas, carrying a machine gun on his back, John McClane-style, does. Shooting opaque surfaces gradually reveals walls, houses, and trees. Instead of damaging the environment, gunfire constructs it in real-time, a visual effect that’s eye-catching and optimized even for weaker hardware.

Dreams of Loneliness

Meanwhile, NPCs deliver snippets of dialog centered on deep-rooted longings: a family of moles wishes to ring a towel bell, a fish hopes to escape its aquarium. Humans range from a lovestruck boy to a clown seeking a new owner for his amusement park. Yet the minimalist dialog often feels simplistic rather than mysterious, and the frequent returns to the title screen further fragment the experience.

Dreams’ plotlines converge in both obvious and oblique ways. While I appreciate interwoven narratives, Amores Perros is one of my favorite films, the connections here don’t resonate. I enjoy obscure art that demands interpretation, but the insubstantial dialog left me detached from its characters.

Occasionally, the game mirrors dream volatility. Tones can shift abruptly, scenes may morph without warning, and characters might vanish inexplicably. But these transitions rarely achieve the intended impact, making the unpredictability feel more random than profound.

It Was All a Dream

Despite its narrative weaknesses, Dreams of Another is visually peerless. Q-Games crafts environments that seem ready to dissolve at any moment, colors bleeding into one another to create the sensation of walking through a living painting. Gunfire blooms across the world like ink dropped into water, yielding a motif that’s more potent than the story.

Largely, Sound design matches this artistry. Ambient hums, faint whispers, and a restrained score enhance the subconscious drift. Silence is wielded with intent, making each auditory cue from distant piano notes to murmured dialog, all stand out. Dreams of Another is so aesthetically distinctive that you’ll wish the storytelling met the same standard.

Wake Me Up Inside (I Can’t Wake up)

Ultimately, Dreams of Another is a stunning audiovisual experiment weighed down by its ambition. The world shimmers with imagination, but once the allure fades, the fragmented narrative and cryptic dialog often lead to confusion. For all its talk of “creation and destruction,” the game neglects to build a meaningful bond between its ideas and its players. It’s a beautiful, fleeting, and frustratingly insubstantial dream.

Dreams of Another was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.