The Creative Library: A Critical Review of ‘Dreams’
Dreams is almost impossible to describe. Media Molecule’s digital sandbox, packaged as a video game, is one of the most unique additions to the gaming sphere in years. Dreams hits that same “weird” spot that other things like Nintendo Labo, Ring Fit Adventure, and Super Mario Maker 2 hit in 2019. Despite being released as a standalone game, it’s ironically a kind of “live service” title in the sense that the core community of Dreams players will be updating the creative library of playable games and assets, known as the Dreamiverse, for years to come.
Despite never having picked up a Media Molecule title prior to this one, I was sold by the outstanding recreations of games in the Dreamiverse I already knew and loved. Just the sheer novelty of spending time in an uncannily similar iterations of already familiar game worlds was enough to get me on board. In Dreams, creation is a deceptively simplistic but accessible entry point for anyone remotely interested in designing a video game.
Dreams earned its social media name largely from mimicking other games, but that was largely all of its initial appeal in-game. That singular focus on mimicry isn’t the end state of the full release of Dreams, however. There is so much more here between tutorials, community jams, and the Media Molecule created campaign, “Art’s Dream.” Since early access, the library of shared user creations has grown considerably, which are alone sufficiently enjoyable to sink dozens of hours into.
From Early Access to Going Gold
I can only think in terms of where this game was at the point of initial early access and where it is now. The strength of the fully released edition of Dreams has nearly doubled since I got my hands on the early access version last year. From the outset, the introduction has evolved from a blocky, clunky morass of tutorials that previously caused me to exclusively spend my time surfing the Dreamiverse – enjoying already made creations instead of generating my own. This proper release sucked me in right from the beginning, causing me to outright ignore the Dreamiverse so I could continue on with the now extremely well fleshed out tutorials, as well as Art’s Dream.
Everything about the way the game boots up now as opposed to back in early access is more welcoming. All of the game’s narrators are extremely kind and encouraging for new players, cheering you on for basic actions but never feeling condescending with their praise. The early animations in the game blend together all sorts of possibilities in terms of lighting, textures, and sounds that highlight the capability of Dreams. The first few minutes of Dreams now truly evoke the range of diverse creations that you can make within the software. The coolest thing to know about the way the game welcomes you is the fact that every asset you see in the game is made through the game’s creative toolkit, including the newly included Art’s Dream.
Early access Dreams felt like someone dropped off a massive toolbox at my house. The full release of Dreams feels like I finally have the instruction manual, as well as the story for why these tools were created in the first place and when I can effectively use them. Even if you, like me, aren’t terribly creative and don’t see yourself spending dozens of hours in a game creator, Dreams at the very least offers a beautiful and positive environment for players of all types to come settle in and enjoy. And the narration during tutorial segments is top notch – somewhere between Portal and Thomas Was Alone in terms of dry humor and sarcasm.
One of the most notable things about Dreams is that the community library isn’t confined to “games.” A well-circulated photorealistic creation of a stunningly appetizing breakfast platter comes to mind as a static creation that isn’t meant to be “played” as much as experienced. Creators in the Dreamiverse have also started creating assets for other creators to use and apply in their own creations – something I don’t remember happening as prominently back in early access. Whereas most gaming studios are comprised of dozens of people, Dreams asks singular players to achieve something analogous. I can’t say whether Media Molecule intended for static creations to take such a foothold within the Dreamiverse initially, but the fact that they’ve now explicitly encouraged creators to share and repurpose each other’s assets is a beneficent gesture that acknowledges the immense task of building games.
The crowning achievement of Dreams is, to me, the overwhelming amount of tweets and YouTube videos entitled something along the lines of “I can’t believe this was made in Dreams.” Dreams consistently outpaces what people who regularly play video games can expect from such a low-barrier-to-entry title. Whereas a program like Unity or Unreal task developers with understanding code, everything in Dreams is done with the Dualshock 4 or Playstation Move controllers. The relationship between the ease of creation and the genuinely impressive polish of the creations that so often go viral online is practically unbelievable.
Extensive Depth to Tutorials
Dreams provides extensively helpful and encouraging tutorial segments that help build a sense of both competence and confidence in the player. The narrator is helpful but also sassy. This sassiness helps inform a brilliant way of both getting the player’s attention and teaching them how to play. By making whimsical remarks like, “Let’s call her Connie, cause she looks like a cone,” as the narrator addresses the literal anthropomorphic cone that the player controls during the tutorial is a bit of dry humor – dare I say conedy – that can be effectively generalized across much else of the game. As if it weren’t enough, the narrator laments not long after that, “Connie’s getting really impatient. You know what cones are like.” In this moment, I was instantly reminded of my first time playing Thomas Was Alone and how shapes can inhere personalities. Yet, like Thomas Was Alone, and in some ways like The Stanley Parable, the corny but admittedly absurd joke drove the point of comic characterization harder than a serious remark could have.
The tutorials that Dreams now offers are overly helpful – even redundant at times – but no one who regularly uses a Dualshock 4 can claim that Dreams entirely lacks accessibility. Each tutorial features an in-frame video that can both be maximized and minimized depending on whether you’d like to focus on the tutorial video and explanation or not. These tutorials walk through multiple classes of Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced creators. At the time of this writing, I consider myself a beginner despite dabbling into some slight areas of intermediacy.
The exploration of these tutorials is worth mentioning as well, considering the abundance of ways that the game intends to teach you how to approach game design. From the outset, Dreams makes available the following tutorials: Start Dreaming, Recommended Tutorials, Art, Logic, Character Creation, Animation, Audio, Gameplay, Masterclasses, How to… Videos!, and Start Dreaming (Motion Controllers). In other words, it’s as if Dreams is its own entire multimedia course accompanied by masterclass sessions and lectures, yet packaged into the approachable confines of typically 2-3 minute video tutorials. Dreams thus allows anyone to start from scratch and effectively begin to build quality games as long as they maintain the determination.
Tedium and Difficulty in the Creation Process
My main problem with creating things in Dreams is the over reliance on motion controls and the subsequently clunky camera that accompanies it. The creative menu is nearly unlimited with options to customize creations, but the process of doing so was predominantly awkward and annoying to me. The motion controlled imp that serves as your creative cursor when playing the game was something that I had to adjust every few minutes by holding the options button – a mechanically clumsiness so annoying that I had to swap game modes every couple hours just to keep myself from going crazy with tedium. The tutorials are ridiculously helpful for learning these mechanics, but applying them can be maddening.
Some aspects of creation in Dreams are easier than others, which might sound obvious, but reveals the aforementioned “deceptively” simple nature of these tools. Moving shapes around, changing their angles and sizes, cloning and building little game worlds – all of these actions are relatively easy despite the camera being sometimes frustrating. Adding sounds and textures to the world is rewarding and takes mere creative inspiration. Things become tricky when moving into animation, trigger points, and logic – the hard science side of game design. Though there are no shortage of tutorials for these aspects of game design, there is too much trial and error for me to patiently animate an entire game.
A Charming Lack of Polish
As a result of the creation system, most of the games that you can find through surfing the Dreamiverse have wonky physics systems and goofy character models. I specifically think of a 3D modeled recreation of the early 2D Pokemon games where it’s both exciting to see a familiar world transformed and a bit like a toddler’s artwork that you magnet to the fridge to make them happy. Or a nifty Dexter’s Laboratory clone that has dozens of signs indicating works in progress. There’s nothing wrong with these creations existing, they just live in the uncanny valley and showcase the unfortunate limitations of these creative tools – or at least the limitations when confined to one individual creator.
Despite the lack of polish found in many creations, there is no doubt that Dreams provides their players with some of the best tools ever given in a game creator. The unbelievably accurate renditions of P.T. for instance, where nearly everything down to the hole in the bathroom is accurately recreated for a novelty playthrough, is a clear example that a creator with enough grit could produce a cult classic within these tools alone. The imperceivably different rendition of a location in Fallout 4 is another moment that humbles contemporary game designers everywhere, considering the technological limitations that Dreams inherently presents. No matter which kind of game you tend to prefer, there are already some above average creations and recreations which rival that of professional demos.
The Narrative Success of Art’s Dream
My favorite aspect of the full release of Dreams is Art’s Dream, a fully written story that encompasses a musical noir adventure game. The story begins with vicarious storytelling through interactive flashbacks, which sets the stage for a refreshingly mellow jazz theme to reprise throughout these sequences. Art is our troubled protagonist who uses his memories to help communicate his current predicament. Through the perspective of D-Bug, whose name I can’t fail to include, and some adjacent childhood toys preserved by his father, Art proceeds to let his imagination dictate arcs of gameplay to us.
Within Art’s story, he encounters a blue-tinted man who serves as both foil and antagonist throughout a majority of Art’s arc. At first, this man asks for a ticket, followed with a briefly fun and lighthearted puzzling sequence involving suitcases and a street musician. This ticket-obsessed blue man continually bursts into lengthy musical songs that remind me somewhat of The Polar Express movie. There are songs for Art’s ticket, for when Art asks the blue man to just chill, and when he needs to enter a password to a later building. It’s all a bit ridiculous, but I found myself laughing and smiling along with a good-natured appreciation for the whimsy that Media Molecule was willing to provide within their story.
Art’s Dream as a Metaphor for Creation
A consistent metaphor that permeates Art’s dream is a tiny dragon that he is chasing. In classical mythology and psychoanalytic thinking, the dragon is a metaphor for one’s greatest fears. In Art’s Dream, his greatest fears are explicitly and clearly revealed when he says: “We’re falling. Always falling. Away from Laila. Away from music. Away from my Band. We’re never gonna stop falling.” In other words, Art’s dragon manifests in terms of his fear of falling away for Laila, music, his band, and the meta-fear that this fallenness will increasingly compound upon itself.
Skimming through much of the narrative so as to leave much of it worth experiencing for yourself, eventually it becomes clear that this blue man is some kind of psychological representation – this is a dream after all – of Art’s imposter syndrome. Self-doubt plagues Art’s character and thus he feels like he is never worthy of praise nor deserving of success. His aspirations, grand as they are, all feel in vain when faced with the latent self-hatred present within his self conception.
Art’s Dream culminates with the genuine realization that nothing is worth doing alone. In the end, he reunites with his band, but that is not the end of his journey within the game. What follows is a brutal but well-checkpointed scenario that directly reminded me of Dr. Kahl’s Robot from Cuphead in terms of its patterns.
In an almost decidedly meta moment towards the end of Art’s Dream, the idea is articulated that “What I realized is that the double bass,” Art’s instrument, “is not just an instrument.” In this instance, I interpret Art’s realization to recognize Dreams itself. For Dreams is not just an instrument – a toolbox with which to make games – Dreams is a game itself, as much as I’d like to argue that it might not be. Art’s Dream is a fantastic way to showcase the potential of Dreams, no matter the apparent flaws. Art’s Dream introduces a diverse array of gameplay blending between dialogue trees and puzzle platforming, it contrasts 2D and 3D animations depending on the context of the scene. Art’s Dream essentially dabbles, borrowing from many recognizable palettes of game design, to entice the player to create something ambitious.
There is no doubt that I will continue to revisit Dreams over the coming months and years. Unlike almost any sandbox title that encourages player creation, I can foresee that there will be many shockingly realistic and fun creations within Dreams that people will make. In those instances, I will gladly reboot the title to give it a whirl. Though I am not much of one to enjoy creating games myself, I cannot imagine a more enjoyable and accessible entry point into doing so than Dreams.
Meta Commentary
In SkillUp’s recent review of Dreams, he makes an early disclaimer that despite saying almost entirely positive things about the game, it isn’t a game for 95% of people – at least in terms of actually sitting down with the game creation software. As a result, there’s a general worry that none of the creations in the Dreamiverse are games that I’d want to spend more than about 15-20 minutes with. Over time, surely this library will expand into something more substantial where a few games truly catch on, but the library – however diverse – has yet to mature into something that will be a regular go-to for the majority of people who pick up Dreams. Dreams doesn’t promise to deliver AAA blockbusters, but we’re likely to see some lastingly beloved indies in years to come.
Another concern that I found to be reasonable arose from Raphael Cano Felix’s review, that Dreams should offer Art’s Dream as a cheaper standalone game. Despite the aforementioned role that Art’s Dream sets player expectations for the potential of long-form creation within Dreams’ software, it would be nice to have Art’s Dream released as either a demo or a cheap entry point to motivate more players to begin creating themselves. As it stands, Dreams might be overwhelming with its creator tools and therefore intimidate new players for giving the game a try. Perhaps if a player could start with Art’s Dream before deciding if they wanted to purchase the creation software, there wouldn’t be so many unfinished works-in-progress cluttering up the Dreamiverse.
A final consideration is whether the freedom that Dreams provides can exist forever. With one hand it democratizes video games as a creative art form, with the other it threatens to lurch into dubious legal territory through its wonderful recreations of popular games. As SkillUp rightly points out, if even YouTube can’t get copyright law right, how can Media Molecule hope to contend against corporate giants who are aggressively protective of their intellectual property? Especially in terms of game franchises that don’t release with regularity, one can imagine diehard fans creating spinoffs and fan-fiction that could sprout cease and desist letters like dandelions.
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