Many games function under the principle of “destroy to advance.” Dreams of Another presents a remarkably fresh perspective: “destroy to create.”
When a game hands you an assault rifle, the objective is quite straightforward: You are here, terrorists/aliens/Nazis are there, eliminate them all! In Dreams of Another, things are entirely different. Here, the weapon is not wielded to eradicate faceless foes with bullets. Rather, it is employed to fabricate the world itself.
In our preview, we detail precisely how this unfolds and how entertaining this adventure is, given its innovative shooter approach.
WTF: The Game
We find ourselves in an age of photorealistic visuals: Unreal, Unity, id Tech, and their counterparts can now generate images that are nearly indistinguishable from our own reality. Even pixel-perfect ray tracing, which was once the apex challenge for all 486 processors 30 years ago, now renders frames in real time rather than taking hours.
Nevertheless, there are also movements counter to this trend, dismissing expensive realism in favor of their artistic visions. Bold comic shaders exemplify one such movement, featuring 2D graphics enriched with substantial pixels that hark back to the VGA era of the early 90s. Then there are titles like Dreams of Another, which appear so surreal that it’s challenging to find words that do them justice. “WTF?” stands out as a fitting choice. Yet, as is often said, images convey more than words, so before continuing, take a moment to view the screenshots:
Q-What?
To grasp Dreams of Another and categorize it correctly, start by examining the developer: Q-Games is an unconventional entity: Established 24 years ago by Star Fox coder Dylan Cuthbert, the Kyoto-based studio is renowned for its small, imaginative, and varied creations within the PixelJunk series.
Throughout its history, the studio has also embarked on unconventional design experiments, such as the peculiar adventure The Tomorrow Children (2016). Now with Dreams of Another, one finds themselves pondering the nature of up and down and the overall essence of the experience.
In pajamas and wielding an assault rifle
The protagonist is the vaguely defined “man in pajamas.” At the outset, he carries a hefty assault rifle slung over his shoulder, eventually acquiring grenades and a rocket launcher. But not for exterminating aliens! Instead, he fires at the landscape composed of strange dots and blobs, which then form complex entities: houses, trees, fountains, or even a complete carousel. It’s like reverse explosions.
The surroundings glimmer and sparkle, everything feels organic and fluid, akin to a blend of Comanche’s voxel graphics and the creative wonders of the demo scene.
Dreamy cloud reading
The underpinning of this is point cloud technology, still infrequently utilized in video games due to its high computational demands and memory usage. Technically, it operates similarly to voxel graphics, but instead of three-dimensional cubes, it employs individual points (or small 2D shapes) that come together to create three-dimensional objects.
In Dreams of Another, this not only yields very organic visuals but also remarkably unique ones, where everything floats and drifts; there are no fixed forms, everything is perpetually in motion—even characters or items like lanterns and houses resemble impressionistic reimaginings of recognizable structures.
The “Dreams” in the title is intentional: the game resembles a surreal dream where everything seems oddly familiar yet entirely different.
Destruction is life!
Dreams of Another embraces the philosophical notion that creation cannot exist without destruction. To create something, something else must first be dismantled. This implies that the world you traverse is amorphous and lacks structure.
Only with a weapon in hand does this formless dream morph into a recognizable environment that you can interact with. Each bullet you discharge into the landscape constructs it piece by piece. This presents a fascinating inversion of typical game conventions, which usually involve lugging such gear around.
So, what exactly does one do in Dreams of Another? It doesn’t fit the mold of a standard action-adventure game, platformer, shooter, or role-playing game. Primarily, it serves as a philosophical concept that, according to lead designer Tomohisa Kuramitsu, commonly known as “Baiyon,” aims to provoke reflection and challenge traditional gaming norms.
For instance, you will encounter various doors that can neither be opened nor entered. Instead, they engage you in conversation, sharing the musings of a typical door. One door, for example, expresses envy of vehicles for their swift movement across the world, while it remains rooted in place. Another is seeking