Media Molecule is a company most known for their Little Big Planet trilogy, alongside its respective spinoffs and a few other lesser known titles. From the moment their company was founded, they made it clear that they were prioritizing user creation content. They wanted to put the power to create fun levels and exciting stories right into the hands of the players, and all of their games include robust customization options. Obviously, the logical follow-up to that sort of company creed is to release a straight-up video game creation game…so they did.
Launched in 2020, Dreams made an immediate splash, and though its core userbase is relatively small, those users are some of the most dedicated and inspirational creators in the world.
There’s simply no way to accurately describe Dreams. Sure, other creation-type games exist. There’s the old Game Maker Engine that’s been around for years, there’s stuff like Mario Maker and Visual Novel Maker, and then there’s some heavy hitters that I myself have a lot of personal experience with, like RPG Maker (which I will definitely write an article on sometime in the future). All of those systems have nothing on Dreams, though, and it’s not even close. In Dreams, anything you can “dream” up is possible…anything!
See, in something like Visual Novel Maker or RPG Maker, the only thing that you can create is visual novel games or RPG games. Mario Maker only allows you to make side scrolling platforming stages, and Game Maker Engine is a fair bit less restrictive, but you’re still limited to more smaller, pixelated, and often either 2D or isometric 3D genres. Dreams unlocks your full creative capability, and any type of game you can imagine is open for creation. In fact, you don’t even have to make a game!
Dreams has three major categories of creation, but it is, of course, up to you how you utilize the tools. The three categories are Games, Art, and Music. The “Games” menu is where you really dive in deep to create fully fleshed out and playable video games, “Art” provides tools to create beautiful, trippy, or even photorealistic scenery, still images, and backgrounds, and “Music” provides a fairly impressive suite of music engineering tools to put together catchy tunes or short sound effects. You can even record voice over or audio snippets from a microphone or external USB and upload them into Dreams.
You can create stuff like this:
And this:
And even this:
Another massive selling point of Dreams is the heavy emphasis on sharing content and creating a unified creative environment. Every single game, piece of art, and musical sound bite can be shared online, where other creators can borrow your content to either add it to their own creation, or remix it into something brand new. Every Dreams player is united together in helping each other out and building grand, one-of-a-kind, collaborative masterpieces. Obviously, everyone involved in the process is given due credit and public exposure.
Speaking of public exposure, after you have put the finishing touches on your creation, you can publish it, which is slightly different from sharing it. Whereas sharing allows other creators to borrow and utilize your content, uploading is the simple act of enabling other Dreams users to play your games, appreciate your art, and listen to your music. You can give a project you enjoyed a thumbs-up, leave a comment, follow the creator for future updates, and save the project so you can return to it in the future if you want to dig into its parts and maybe use some of it for your own creation (if, of course, the original creator allows it to be shareable).
There’s a reason I’ve been trying to make a distinction between the terms “creator” and “user” in this article. See, creating something in Dreams, while presumably extremely fun and satisfying, is also time consuming, occasionally difficult, and requires a lot of dedication. In the entire time I’ve owned Dreams, I’ve never created a single thing, and probably never will. I’ll leave that to the professionals. I mean, why push myself to create, when I can enjoy the endless hours of infinite entertainment available just by playing and experiencing everyone else’s creations! For the remainder of this article, I’ll highlight some of my favorite creations. Trust me, even these are just a drop in the bucket!
(Just as a little public service announcement to those of you out there with a PS4 or PS5 who haven’t yet bought Dreams: It’s only $9 from GameStop and $20 from Amazon. I would highly, highly recommend picking up a copy.)
One of the first Dreams creations that I ever played was “Heavenly Castle”. It’s part of a series of adventure games created by a user named Chris_Redwalker6, and his talent is immeasurable when it comes to crafting highly detailed and fully explorable scenic vistas. It’s so much fun scaling this mountain from its snowy, windy base, all the way to the massive castle resting atop its peak.
A big standout game in my opinion is “Trip’s Voyage”. Like, it’s easy to actually forget you aren’t playing a real commercial video game called “Trip’s Voyage”, because this little gem just feels like a forgotten classic from the GameCube era. Trip can jump, flip, dive, tail spin, bounce, and roll his way around three big islands jampacked with shiny collectables, quirky characters, and secrets galore. It’s a fun, charming experience.
Not all content in Dreams has to be completely new material, as is the case with “Donkey Kong Odyssey”. A few dedicated users took it upon themselves to basically create the next entry in the oft-overlooked series, and the moment you start playing it feels like you’re right at home. They nailed the control of Donkey and Diddy Kong, the atmosphere and environments, the music and sound effects, and the satisfying gameplay of swinging through jungles and collecting bananas. A must-play for Donkey Kong fans.
A lot of projects aren’t completed yet, but that just makes the ones that are that much more special, like “Polterpunch”. This is a three-to-four hour platforming adventure that sees you controlling a plucky ghost named Dolan (and his sarcastic friend Spiro) as they rescue their ghost friends. This game hits all of the highlights of the genre, while also being centered around the unique mechanic of punching between the mortal and ghost realms. This game just does not let up on the innovative level design, humorous character writing, and surprisingly great custom soundtrack (all recorded in Dreams, of course).
Have I sold you yet on Dreams? How about another small snippet of the addicting craziness you can concoct with this limitless creation engine?
Like this:
Or this:
How about this:
Or even this:
And last but certainly not least:
So, there you have it. One percent of one percent of the total offerings that Dreams provides, all for free (aside from the very low cost of Dreams itself). Not only is Dreams one heck of a creative development tool, but it makes a genuinely compelling argument for being the only video game that you might ever need in your life. After all, it’s not as if you’ll ever run out of games to play, music to listen to, or art to appreciate!
10/10
But hey, that’s just my opinion!
The Contrarian Corner 