Introduced to the world during PlayStation’s State of Play back in February 2025, Dreams of Another is the latest experimental game from Japanese studio Q-Games. A title that aims to highlight the intrinsic link between destruction and creation, is Dreams of Another a game you should wake up for, or something to hit the snooze button on? Like the many deep quandaries posed by this game, the answer isn’t a simple one.

Give It Your Best Shot

When you see a gun in a video game, you can usually predict what happens next. You pull the trigger and blood splatters everywhere, stuff gets blown up and you dole out death and destruction. Dreams of Another turns that whole premise on its head. In this third person shooter, your assault rifle is used to create.

The world that it presented to you in this game initially lacks substance. Like it’s viewed through a rain slick window, or covered in soap bubbles, the scenery and characters are hidden from view. That is until you shoot stuff. Spray the world with bullets and where they land, the world is focused into a corporeal form. Fields of molecules will tighten to create walls, trees and the scenes that were hidden below. Dreams of Another takes the destructive action of shooting a gun, something many of you reading this will have done countless times before, and shapes it into an action of creation.

Even the few ‘enemies’ in the game present a way to create. These balls of atoms which drift or bounce around can’t harm the player; instead, they remove the focus of the world as they move through it. Shoot them enough times however, and they’ll fall down and repair some of the damage they’ve done.

Dreams of Another benefits from a fantastic art style, reminiscent of the Pointillism art movement, but it’s never more pretty than when you’re bringing it into existence. Blowing your way through a wall of foam to unveil the surprises below is a regular source of job in this game.

While this mechanic works in a literal sense, utilising a tool designed to kill to sharpen and craft the world around you, it also helps reinforce the feeling that you’re in a dream. At first, the very action of shooting a world into existence out of bubbles feels exactly like something you’d wake up and furrow an eyebrow about. In fact, most of the game will have you questioning whether you’re asleep or awake. Especially the narrative.

Follow Your Dreams… If You Can

For much of my time with Dreams of Another, the storyline had me feeling like I was walking around a modern art gallery, not quite understanding what I was looking at. I hate to sound like the man looking at a painting of a can of soup, exclaiming ‘I just don’t get it‘, but it’s true. The narrative, and the way it is presented, felt disjointed, abstruse, drawn out and confusing.

Here’s what I could glean from my play through of Dreams of Another: You play as a character called ‘the man in pajamas’ who’s asleep in his bed. Guided by another character called ‘the wandering soldier’, you’re venturing through multiple dreamscapes, forming them as you go with your weapons and interacting with characters and items in order to progress a story.

These multiple dreamscapes are played out in alternating chunks that switch between stories once you’ve made some progress. One moment you’ll be in a park, talking to a clown about fairground rides, and the next you’ll be wandering around inside an aquarium (actually inside, like, inside the tank) as you try to help fish find a way to the ocean. In isolation, I imagine these stories could be enjoyable. Presented as they are however, in disjointed chunks, they’re challenging to follow and just when you’re getting into one plot, you’re whisked away to continue a different one.

What’s even stranger is that every so often, you’re arbitrarily sent back to the start menu of the game. This start menu does evolve as you progress through the game, leaning into an over arching story, but it’s jarring when this happens. This further breaks down the pacing of the game and dampens its more powerful moment.

There’s every chance that this is method of storytelling is intentional. Dreams are hard to comprehend and interpret, and the game certainly replicates that feeling. If that was the aim of Dreams of Another, then mission accomplished. I wouldn’t say that it makes for a particularly enjoyable game thought, and that its messages get somewhat lost in the shuffle of stories.

Dream A Little Dream

Eventually, the narrative threads do tie themselves together, and it becomes clear that much of what you’ve seen is symbolism. It didn’t all make sense to me, even when the credits rolled, but at least some of the arcs made some sense. It took persistence to get there however.

This is because the structure of the game becomes repetitive. Each chapter of the story involves the same cycle. Load into the area, shoot all of the bubbles and enemies, interact with some objects, watch a cut scene. This same sequence repeats throughout Dreams of Another with very little variation. Even when you’ve unlocked the grenades and RPG’s (yes, you’ll also be exploding the world into being), it doesn’t take the tedium out of progression.

The few moments when the game does deviate from this formula are fun respite, but they’re short lived. The most interesting diversions from the formula are the ‘boss fights’. Again, these bosses can’t hurt ‘the man in pajamas’ but task him to shoot weak points in order to defeat them. There’s little challenge involved here, tasking the player to find the right angle in the area to shoot the correct place, but it’s better than shooter countless bubbles.

Daydream In Music

If there’s one thing that Dreams of Another absolutely delivers on, it’s the music. Baiyon, who scored the soundtrack to Pixeljunk Eden and contributed tracks to LittleBigPlanet 2, has crafter a dreamlike score here that sets the tone of the scenes expertly. From gentle piano tracks during the most emotional moments to upbeat jaunty synths during the ‘boss battles’, the music is a highlight from the game.

It’s a real shame that those highlights are so sparce in Dreams of Another. The game is undeniably pretty to look at, the music is delightful, and the core mechanic of shooting the world into existence is refreshing – at least for a short time. It’s just a shame that the rest of the game flits between a confusing hallucination and a snoozefest.

Dreams of Another is launching on PlayStation 5 (review platform) and PC on October 10th, 2025.

Developer: Q-Games
Publisher: Q-Games

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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