Dreams of Another feels like a fever dream

Dreams of Another is like playing an art-filled dream. It’s filled with unexpected events, disjointed acts, and hazy landscapes. Scenes end abruptly, and then you unexpectedly pick up the thread later on. You’ll meet talking angel statues and fish that want to escape their home and swim to the ocean. But it’s that same unstable, dreamlike quality that makes the game so memorable.

In Dreams of Another, from PixelJunk developer Q-Games, you play as a pajama-clad man who is aptly referred to only as the Man in Pajamas. He wields a gun given to him by a man called the Wandering Soldier. In the opening sequence, the soldier realizes he is unable to shoot a bullet from that gun. But in the Man in Pajamas’ hands, the gun doesn’t destroy things but instead “creates” them.

Q-Games says Dreams of Another is a “third-person exploration-action game,” but it’s easier to understand the game as a series of vignettes rather than by its genre. When you’re dropped into an environment in Dreams from Another, which usually happens suddenly and without any preamble, parts of the landscape are deconstructed into a bunch of tiny, colorful pieces. When you shoot the pieces with your gun, they’ll solidify into things like a bench, a tree, a building, a person, or a shipwreck. But even then, the objects in the world will still be made of the loosely connected pieces, giving them the impression that they could all scatter apart at a moment’s notice, and sometimes things do actually start to split up.

As you shoot the pieces of the world, things will solidify into objects that you can have conversations with, like the Wandering Soldier, or a clown who creates a giant ring statue out of the rings of divorced partners, or even seemingly inanimate objects like a bench pondering the nature of consciousness. Characters speak in a halting, unnatural way and say strange things: Once, after taking a photo of her husband, an old lady said that it would “make a nice funeral portrait for him.” And each “scene” typically lasts a few minutes before the entire environment comes apart, fades to white, and the game drops you someplace new — or brings you back to the main menu screen, which features the Man in Pajamas sleeping in his bed.

The strangeness of it all can make things difficult to follow. The game is often more concerned with exploring ideas about art, consciousness, and human nature rather than having every moment make sense or be “fun.” But it also has a welcome sense of unpredictability; at any moment during my six-hour-long playthrough, I had basically no idea what to expect. I found that, like in a real dream, even if it’s tough to keep everything straight, there are profound moments that stick with you long after it’s over.

^{Dreams of Another is available now on PS5 and PC.}