Dreams
Developer Media Molecule Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now
PS4
From limitation comes creativity. Much of the joy of LittleBigPlanet came from seeing what trickery other, smarter players invented to implement unintended features in their creations. Dreams, however, has very few limitations. Media Molecule’s latest, seven years in the making, is a simple-to-use, head-spinningly powerful creation tool: with DualShock 4 in hand, you can do everything from sculpt and animate things from scratch to compose cinematic soundtracks, control puppets and code AI, before using your creations in open-world adventures or co-op brawlers, short films, digital art museums or interactive jokes. In Dreams you can make almost anything.
Naturally, people are making what they already know. Head to the community showcase ‘Dream Surfing’ area, and you’ll immediately see Mario, Sonic and Shrek beaming back at you. Our first go at ‘Auto Surfing’, in which Dreams feeds you a stream of player-created scenes, is as striking as it is dispiriting. A tech demo for a game based on The Flash; a pixelated Tomb Raiderstyle effort; a Superman flight sim; and a Spider-Man web-slinging adventure – the trend is so pervasive that we begin to wonder whether Dreams isn’t a bridge too far. Without the consistency of Sackboy’s cardboard world framing their creations, players faced with overwhelming possibilities are finding their feet by treading old ground.
It seems churlish to blame Media Molecule, which has done almost everything right in terms of introducing players to this remarkable piece of software. A year-long early access period has paid dividends:
Dreams’ onboarding process has been honed beautifully. Thank goodness, as anyone hoping to gorge themselves immediately on Create mode without first eating their vegetables will be in for a shock. Fortunately, the games-slash-tutorials are a breeze to follow, can be paused or rewound at will and even called into your creation space as a handy pop-out. With the help of sharp scripts, neat pacing and a likeable cast, there’s enough to disguise the taste of some of the less exotic but essential lessons, such as getting to grips with the initially fiddly camera and movement controls.
And then there’s Art’s Dream, Media Molecule’s feature-length flagship creation made for the platform,
with the platform. Through a mix of 3D platforming, combat, point-and-click puzzle-solving and musical numbers, it tells the story of a musician who’s become disillusioned with his own creative abilities. It’s a little uneven in places – Frances and Foxy’s brawling sections are particularly forgettable – but it serves its purpose of being a mission statement for Media Molecule, and a showcase of what’s possible in Dreams.
Much of it verges on magical. A winning combination of accessibility via careful teaching and simple tools means that complex creative concepts are abstracted, and brought within reach in minutes. Allowing players to ‘spray on’ colours, effects and animation is a revelation. To make wind-ruffled foliage, we can use the sculpt tool to smear a crude 3D shape, made up of cubes and resembling a clump of tree leaves. Select another tool and hover over the shape and we can spritz on a bit of Impressionism, essentially, with trigger presses. We can even change how each fleck of paint looks, to distinguish individual leaf shapes. Another tool lets us spray on green hues, and another a rough finish. Lastly, a wave effect allows us to paint on animation so that our leaves sway gently. Open up the Tweak menu, and we can get even more granular with our creations – moving sliders for fine control over almost every element of a selection, or adding a sound effect when a player sloshes through a river we’ve made.
And this is just sculpting. Similarly accessible concepts with hidden depths exist in the motioncontrolled instrument-playing of the music tools giving way to something akin to Ableton, or the pick-up-andmove keyframe recordings of puppetry being a friendly alternative to a sophisticated system of using Logicdriven signal pulses for smooth stop-motion animation. That’s to say nothing of what players are coming up with: one has already shared an analogue technique of randomly scattering rocks in a scene by sculpting a large bowl with which to pour them out over the landscape.
The rough-and-ready nature of the surface level of the creation tools cleverly affords much of
Dreams’ creations a distinctive Media Molecule look – painterly, homemade – while the precision available beneath everything ensures that those with enough patience have the freedom to craft things the studio might hesitate to associate itself with. Yes, we have played all manner of things that peg some of Dreams’
creators for future employment at the studio: Ruckus, in which we play an adorably doughy, laser-spitting kaiju bent on destruction; A Little Place In Outer Space, a pastoral planet exploration game that reminds us of
Outer Wilds. But we’ve also seen psychological horror films that will haunt our dreams, featuring glistening flesh-monsters that Masahiro Ito would probably deem a bit much. It’s the kind of stuff that marks an increased confidence on the part of Media Molecule: in its ability to present a coherent identity while still offering the freedom and trust to players to define its game. And for now, players are abiding by the studio’s core values of positive collaboration – largely thanks to the carefully implemented tone, framework and features of Dreams.
The Dreamiverse is its crowning glory, a feat emblematic of the game’s kitbashing spirit. What if we don’t feel like making our splashing river sound – or anything, really – from scratch? Well, then we’re two buttons away from this giant database of player-created
Complex creative concepts are abstracted, and brought within reach in minutes
stuff, from pre-made lighting effects for apocalyptic skies to playable sharks to the foley work we’re seeking. Open up the search tool, select your desired element, and you can instantly place it in your own scene, and ‘remix’ it to your liking by editing or iterating on it – or, as we often do, open up its guts to learn how it works, and use the knowledge in your own experiments. It is the solution to the paralysis that a blank canvas so often induces. Dreams absolves us of the expectation of making everything from scratch; as a result, we find ourselves more creative than we’d ever imagined.
Through the Dreamiverse, it’s easier than ever to share what you’ve made, and for your work to be used, with full credit, as part of something bigger, should you allow it. Established outfits of like-minded dreamers have already formed. But then there are players who do little else but sculpt hyper-realistic patisserie, or spend their time curating collections of related elements to help someone make a bullet-hell game. There are players who like to playtest early builds and leave feedback, and those who specialise in character design. Others simply play or create, with no particular end in mind. Dreams rewards them all. And if the incentive of XP and prizes isn’t enough, the silent support of community through the Dreamiverse and the hidden capabilities under the surface of each friendly looking tool means that Dreams has a kind of self-guided dynamic difficulty, where players can decide exactly how much of a leg-up they’d like. Simply having the option to hop between disciplines in a single space, to dip a toe into everything or hone in on something and master it, is unprecedented – perhaps even miraculous.
Still, that’s not a word you’d use about the majority of Dreams’ player creations. While Dreams will undoubtedly be a launchpad for some incredible things, it’s going to take time before we see work that rivals the runtime, ambition and polish of Art’s Dream. Perhaps it’s the result of Media Molecule failing to provide enough detailed tutorials on the darker arts of game design at launch. Then again, Dreams is not exclusively a game engine, nor does it pretend to be – its focus is broader, its aim to encourage a game-literate console audience to play in all the different spaces that make up its favourite medium. More likely, it’s simply that this digital creative playground is light years ahead of LittleBigPlanet in terms of potential, and will require some getting used to before we see its final form.
But what is already clear is that Dreams kicks back at the kind of questions that have become all-consuming in not just the way we think about videogames, but our lives. What’s the result? How does it all stack up? Is it good? Is it worth it? Is it art? Everything about Dreams celebrates the fact that anything is at all. And so now, when we scroll past the janky homages to Spider-Man and Mario, we think differently: about what it takes to make something, about how it feels to discover a talent you thought you never had. We think about exactly what it means for a PS4 game to have cracked open sculpting, composing, coding, performing, curating, cinematography and game design for more players, more kinds of people, all at once to a nearly unlimited degree – alongside a philosophy that might encourage the most reluctant to consider what they might be capable of, and what it might mean to them. How does it all stack up? It feels almost silly to ask.