Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Dreams
Ignore self-doubt … Dreams.
Ignore self-doubt … Dreams.

Dreams review – creative learning as delightful play

This article is more than 4 years old

PS4; Media Molecule/Sony Computer Entertainment
This compulsive genre-crossing title combines animation studio with design toolkit and social network as it teaches game creation

Everyone who plays Media Molecule’s Dreams will come away with their own story of when, exactly, it clicked for them. Part game design toolkit, part digital audio workstation, part animation studio and part social network, there’s something here for every niche, every creative ambition. For me, it was “animating” a balloon in the background of a 3D platformer stage. I popped down a camera gadget from an attractive, simple menu, grabbed the balloon with the cursor, and recorded a less-than-elegant motion loop by wagging the Dualshock’s gyro about.

This realisation that I could direct traps and traversal, cutscenes and contraptions, by acting out what I wanted to happen on screen was my first inkling that Dreams might live up to its promise: to erode the intimidating, seemingly insurmountable barriers between creator and audience; to provide tools intuitive enough to facilitate, rather than complicate, creativity in its most earnest and experimental forms. We’re only talking about a balloon, but it felt like the finishing brush strokes on The Starry Night. Give me a pencil, and I’ll have trouble drawing you a balloon you could recognise. Within an hour of play, Dreams was letting me animate one.

As delightful as Dreams is as a toolkit, what is perhaps just as important is how it teaches, and Dreams is everything a good teacher should be: generous, forgiving, thorough. Most of all, Dreams is encouraging. Hours of practical and video tutorials, along with achievements for progress, compulsively frame learning as structured play.

A huge variety of visual styles can be achieved in the game. Photograph: Media Molecule/Sony

Encouraging, too, are the social aspects. You don’t just share levels or art pieces, but the individual elements that make up those creations. If you’re great at music but find animation difficult, for example, you can upload your own music packs for others to benefit from, and search the “dreamiverse” for another’s animations to complement your own work. Alongside this, there are templates for genres such as first-person shooters and platformers that provide a basic framework for addition and repetition.

As well as creation and play mode – dream shaping and dream surfing respectively – Dreams comes packaged with a two- to three-hour story mode called Art’s Dream that tells of a forlorn double bass player in the days after a split from his band. It’s a melancholy, occasionally goofy and ultimately hopeful tribute to art and creation for its own sake. It’s also somewhat of a mission statement for Dreams, urging players to ignore self-doubt and let their creativity bloom.

Gameplay wise, it’s a mashup of genre and visual styles, acting as a showcase for the platform. It does seem a bizarre choice on Media Molecule’s part, then, not to allow players to remix this flagship story mode. When you create your own “dreams” and upload them for others to use, you can toggle the option to allow remixes, which gives players access to the framework and guts of your creation. This allows them to tweak your work and re-upload it, but it also provides an invaluable learning tool for those looking to discover how the more complicated elements are achieved. It seems like a missed opportunity, and perhaps a direct contradiction to Dreams’ core philosophy, to not allow players to dissect and learn from the creation marketed as a high point of the possibilities the platform offers.

Towards the end of Art’s Dream, the titutar Art encounters an old friend working the booth at a cinema. As happens a few times over the course of the story, the pair get into a thinly veiled but still lovely and inspiring conversation about the philosophy of creativity, culminating in the cinema worker telling Art: “Nothing is a waste of time if you love doing it.”

It’s a great attitude. It’s also a convenient one if you happen to be selling a locked platform. If you make something in Dreams, it stays in Dreams. Media Molecule has spoken about implementing ways for players to monetise their creations, but currently only Sony and the developers can profit. Every creation, for now, increases the value of a commercial product from which creators have no way to benefit. How you feel about this will be the deciding factor on whether the game is for you. Elsewhere, PlayStation VR and online multiplayer support are also promised but have not yet been implemented.

Dreams nonetheless still offers a set of powerful, enjoyable tools at a low price and hours of fantastic tutorials. Adults may find the presentation a little too charmed by its own whimsy, especially in light of the tension between an art for art’s sake message and a commercial walled garden. Yet it’s likely to encourage many younger players to bring their own dreams to life.









Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed