Dreams of Another Review

Dreams of Another is a third-person exploration-action game developed and published by Q-Games Ltd., their most notable titles that I know of being Dead Hungry and All You Need Is Help, but also the PixelJunk series. This, however, looked way more different than their other titles, like one of those artsy projects more about delivering a message than, well, being fun. Games like The Graveyard came to mind when looking at the images on the Steam page, but it also reminded me of That Dragon, Cancer and that makes me tear up whenever I think about it. But what sort of art game gives an MP5 submachine gun except this one? I had to find out.

The story is about two people: The Man in Pajamas and The Wandering Soldier, as they explore the dream world, encountering strange people, strange situations, and strange talking objects all throughout, all for the purpose of finding out why the Man in Pajamas is here in the first place. It's all about the nature of humanity, the fleeting concept of life, what it means to create and destroy, and what to keep or to let go.

Everyone in the game is voice-acted, which is really nice, but it was weird. It definitely felt like the VAs were simply reading the lines of the page, and… I kind of liked it? It helped sell the dreamlike state everything is, along with the music that haunts each place. 

What drew me to reviewing this from the screenshots alone is the art style. It’s all made up of circles and squares, using some sort of point cloud technology, giving the whole game a sort of ethereal quality to it where images and shapes blur into one another before being given a solid form. It looks great and satisfying to see the world from around your bullets and explosives.

The other thing that drew me to the game was the gun. Instead of creating destruction with every trigger pull, it reforms the world around you, turning a mass of circles into a solid shape, like doors, trees, and people. If you don't, the distortion will slow you down and won't allow you to interact with anything. The shooting itself felt good, which is important because you’ll be doing that a lot. Sometimes, you’ll need to “calm” an object by blasting its aura a bunch. Each one offers a unique challenge, but not a very difficult one when you get down to it.

Throughout your adventure, you’ll find little odds and ends on the ground that you can pick up, like broken pottery, gems, empty bottles, rings of the divorced, that sort of thing. If you hand over that junk to the Wandering Soldier, he’ll give you upgrades, new weapons, and refill your special ammo, while also giving little tidbits about what that item might mean to someone and why it was found on the floor.

And that’s pretty much the entire game: exploring and shooting stuff… and I just found it dull. There's something I learned while attending creative writing classes: show, don't tell. Describe the moonlight glinting off the broken glass rather than the moon itself. Here, I was being told a story, rather than shown it. It felt more like a ride than a game, constantly being taken from story beat to story beat with no rhyme or reason, with the interactivity in between feeling hollow. The whole “shooting the world” became more like busy work than a fun mechanic.

As for the writing, I can't even tell if it's really being serious or not, spouting off a bunch of faux-philosophical stuff that really, really doesn't mean anything at the end of the day, before constantly sending you to the main menu to break the pacing. It’s just… frustratingly boring. Art doesn’t need to be comprehensible to everyone, but games still have to provide some sort of entertainment, and unfortunately, this just didn’t click with me.

Other than the writing, though, Dreams of Another is technically sound, running at 60 FPS all the way, though the camera can be a pain at times to control. You can beat it in around ten hours, but I don’t feel satisfied with the short time I spent with it.

Dreams of Another is fascinating on the surface, but ultimately doesn’t have all that much substance underneath. It’s telling a story to you through a medium that lets you experience it yourself, spelling out every word and asking you questions about each letter to ensure you get it. It does have some pretty beautiful, funny, and sombre moments that did draw me in further, and had some thought-provoking quotes, but I was taken out of it by the structure they’re built from.

Dreams of Another comes out on the 10th of October, 2025.