Opening up the community to a whole new level of player-designed gaming is Media Molecule with their latest PS4 exclusive title Dreams. Where most level building games have assets in place for players to use and the gameplay will be roughly the same, just in a map designed by a player within the community, this game took it a step further. In fact, I would say that Dreams isn’t truly a game but rather a platform and game engine.
Story
There literally is no story because the game is about community contributions. They did design a game called “Art’s Dream” within Dreams to showcase the fact that you can make anything you want inside Dreams. This title was designed fully within the game engine and shows off gameplay from platforming to action, to point-and-click.
Gameplay
Once you are loaded into Dreams, you are given a quick tutorial to control the triangle on the screen called Connie. Once you do that, you can walk over to the imp to help you with your own imp or to a highlighted spot to open the menu. This menu gives you options to look at your own profile, go Dream surfing, and everything else.
Dream Surfing is a lot like going on YouTube and looking up a video you want. The difference is that everything here can be from a mix of things including games, showcases, and short animation clips. No matter what you find here, it was created by someone in the community. If you like whatever you watch or play, you can choose to follow the creator or follow the project as well as add it to your personal favorites or put it in a “play later” list.
Once you check out what’s trending, what’s popular, what Media Molecule made, and what Media Molecule suggests, you can also search for anything specific. For instance, someone created a full game of where they thought the story of Silent Hills was going to go and you can play through their entire creation (which took roughly an hour or so to play through). There are also brand new ideas, remakes, trolls, and everything you could expect on YouTube to be in here in the form of a game or short.
The actual gameplay differs from the game you have chosen, so this includes everything from action to platforming to puzzle solving to walkthrough experiences to horror titles and so much more. This game is nothing but a platform for others to make their own games! From my time in Dreams, I would suggest checking out: Spherical, Silent Hills, and The Pilgrim. Those three will give you a variety of styles that you can see how boundless Dreams really is.
If you don’t go Dream Surfing, the other option is Creating a Dream. I would suggest going through just about every tutorial they have before starting though because there are a lot of tricks to help things go a lot faster and information that will help you understand how to navigate the system. When creating a dream though, keep in mind that you will be putting an entire game experience together yourself! This means animations, sounds, designs, assets, and literally everything else needs to be either put in place or created by you. The good news is that people can put their created assets and characters into the cloud for all Dreams users to pull from and include in their games.
The craziest part about all of this is that loading things up takes almost no time! There are barely any load times, even when you are loading up new games from multiple creators back to back. This is truly a platform for game development and unique experiences more than it is a game in itself.
Graphics
Everything that is created by the community can be improved to the user’s best abilities, but there is a sort of cartoon-style design that all the games share. No matter what the style or type of game you are playing, don’t be surprised to see that the surface style is similar to the other games even if it is a different shape, color, and everything else.
Sounds
This is dependent upon who’s work you load up. The music in the menus is nice and soft though.
Replayability
There is an infinite amount of replayability with Dreams. Honestly, it is slightly addicting much like YouTube. I know I have been comparing this title to YouTube a lot, but it is nothing but a platform for the community to exploit to the full extent. As long as you keep finding games to play, as long as people continue to create different experiences, and as long as the servers remain up, there will always be more to do.
What Could Be Better
Using the PS4 controller's motion controls to create games is rather difficult. I would have liked there to be an option for us to use buttons only to give a truly steady, fully-controlled way to work on our creations. Perhaps if they added a VR version to the game so I could use the move controllers instead it wouldn’t be a problem, but using the controller itself makes it difficult to neatly place assets where I want them.
Conclusion
Dreams is the ultimate community platform for game development and player experience! You never know what you will find while you are playing through the vast creations on the platform and the variety of what is available continues to expand as the userbase does. I see this game outlasting the system, being moved up to the PS5, and lasting throughout the entire life cycle of that platform as players continue to fill the servers with unique creations.
