The line between art and games has never been thinner. We are slowly coming to the end of the PlayStation 4 era. In the last months of this year, we will have met with PlayStation 5, maybe we will buy it and start to get lost in the first games. However, the final nail for PlayStation 4 has not been hammered yet. In fact, there is a production that was announced in 2013, the release year of PlayStation 4, and finally went on sale on February 14, 7 years later. We're talking about Dreams, of course. Dreams, which has been under development for exactly 7 years by Media Molecule, which has presented us with a legend like Little Big Planet in the past, is one of the most difficult and at the same time easiest productions to personally review and criticize. Even the word production is a better choice than calling Dreams a game, as Dreams is not a game in the full sense of the word. In fact, I need to tell you at the beginning of the review, not what Dreams is, but what it is not. Let's get started.
Game Type
Family game - Puzzle - Kids
Pluses
+ Endless possibilities for creative minds
+ Gorgeous graphics, sounds
+ Countless dreams to visit and see
Cons
- Control difficulty in dream creation part
Like I said, Dreams isn't exactly a game. What I mean by game is not something that you can run, follow a story and have fun, fear, get excited about, or concentrate on one or more of these types of emotions. If your expectation is an adventure like Uncharted, action like Call of Duty, or a story like Death Stranding, Dreams is not for you.
Dreams is an Inception-like experience that lives up to its name, invites you to dozens of different dreams, and even creates your own dreams and makes others live. Dreams is perhaps the most ambitious and high-quality of the Sandbox-type productions that we have heard frequently in recent years. Dreams is a world of dreams that can be transformed into works of art in skilled hands and become the digital museum of PlayStation.
The developer team at Media Molecule is obsessed with the creativity within the players. Likewise, in Little Big Planet, there was a great deal of freedom offered to the players. Dreams, on the other hand, increases this freedom many times and offers the players the opportunity to liberate the environment and mechanics almost as they wish. However, this is not an easy situation to describe in words.
Now, before I move on to the mechanics of Dreams and how it plays out, I'd like to dive a little deeper into visual design. Because I believe that the blur of dreams is reflected in a magnificent way here. Dreams is not a visually realistic production. The realism of its graphics in 4K won't blow your mind, but it's able to do so with its beauty. All the coatings and lightings you see in the production are blurry, just like a dream. You can remember the experience of all the productions you have tried in Dreams, but the details are always blurred in your mind. Again just like a dream. There are a few productions I have tried in it, which I can say without exaggeration, if you take a screenshot and hang it in a modern art museum, many art lovers will think it is a work of art by a famous painter. Again, I find it difficult to express it in words, but even the simplest work turns into an art in Dreams. I can say that Media Molecule has narrowed the line between video games and art with Dreams.
Dreams will draw attention with its creativity-focused structure as well as its graphics. If the game's accessibility was not limited to PlayStation only, if the production was also released for the PC platform, it could be a great competitor in front of Minecraft. Because Dreams is a production that can offer something not only to adults, but also to everyone from 7 to 70. I believe that in a few months there will be news that Dreams is being played in a few schools in the Nordic countries. We are faced with a magnificent production to push children to art and creativity.
If I give a few examples from the dreams created, you can understand what is actually possible. For example, I tried an adventure game created by the developer of Dreams, using only the dream generator in Dreams. With its voice acting and game mechanics, I couldn't help feeling like it was playing a different game on its own, rather than any dream experience in Dreams. In the game, point & click, platform, hack & slash types seem to be blended and a product has been created.
In a dream created by other users, I literally logged into Fallout 4. It was officially a guest of Fallout 4 Dreams with its menu design, music, in-game models, direct RPG conversation window and even animations. Only from these two examples can we understand what Dreams is pregnant with. In addition, hundreds of different dreams such as flight simulations, car races, FPS games have been presented to users by users.
Apart from the games you can play, artistic works are also interesting, 3D animations of famous painters' paintings, remakes of some animated films in Dreams, funny little animations, etc. It's as if Dreams has turned into a social media platform for creative minds. Jumping from dream to dream offers an amazing experience. The diversity in the production is so great that in the early 90's there were 999999 in 1 Atari tapes, you literally experience that excitement again. Browsing through Dreams' endless digital gallery, traveling to different imaginations has never been so enjoyable and beautiful in any other production. Yes, if I had to sum up Dreams in one word, I would use the word beautiful.
As I come to the last words, I would like to mention one thing. The future of productions in Dreams is so bright that perhaps for the first time in the history of video games, I may even review a game within a game in the near future. The quality productions that I have witnessed in such a short time increase the likelihood of this possibility. As I have mentioned before, Dreams is a production that can attract the attention of everyone from 7 to 70. If you are a parent, you will want to play with your child, if you are a teacher, you can develop the creativity of your students, if you are an artist, you can show your art to millions, or if you are an actor, you can just play a game. If you own a PS4, definitely don't miss Dreams!
