She Dreams Elsewhere
Fighting inner demons (and dogs) in this surreal RPG
PC, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Waking up in your apartment, which is dimly lit as if underwater, you step outside, following the corridor until it leads you into a dungeon. A disembodied voice guides you. You’re handed a weapon to use to defend yourself against shadowy entities, which quickly fall. Then you reach a room with a mysterious, apparently invincible figure. “Sweet dreams,” they mutter – but just as they deliver the finishing blow, you’re back in your room. Of course it was just a dream. Right?
As creator Davionne Gooden explains, all of this pseudo-8bit RPG – which has Mother in its foundations, while taking inspiration from Persona and real life – takes place within the dreams of Thalia, who’s “just your average, everyday depressed girl”. The opposite, in other words, of the archetypal RPG hero who tends to embody optimism. We get a sense of her personality through both her self-loathing-filled observations and dialogue choices. “It’s less of what would the player do and more like what would Thalia do in that situation,” Gooden explains.
Although in a dream with licence for exaggeration, Gooden keeps things grounded, which comes across most clearly in the raw, unfiltered dialogue. While the demo warns us about strong language, we’re still surprised by a casually dropped c-bomb in the middle of a house party; this certainly isn’t another wholesome JRPG throwback. “The game is officially rated M,” Gooden laughs. “When it comes to the dialogue-writing process, it’s always about staying true to the characters, staying true to how an actual person will talk. Especially seeing people who both look and talk like me – that was always something important that I wanted in the game.”
The mood is enhanced by the mellow lo-fi soundtrack, a mix of original music from Mimi Page and licensed music Gooden sourced from independent artists. As vocalist Aleksia sings, “I’m stuck in purgatory, can you see that I’m suffering from this?” the lyrics resonate with Thalia’s state of mind. “I guess I’m just pretty good at picking out the tracks,” Gooden says. “I can’t wait for people to check out the rest of the soundtrack.”
As the demo’s narrative-focused first half shifts from house party to dungeon crawling, RPG conventions – turn-based party combat, light puzzles and elemental weakness exploits – set in. Gooden nonetheless puts his own signature twist on the genre: you get a ‘safe and sound’ message at the end of a battle, and dogs act as save points – and, yes, you can pet them. “I’ve loved dogs my entire life. When I was a kid, I had 12 dogs at one point,” he says. “I had save crystals originally, then one day I was like, ‘This is just boring, so let’s switch up the vibe a little bit’. When I switched it to a dog, the game suddenly had much more of a personality.”
Dogs are certainly a greater source of comfort for Thalia than people. Indeed, she ventures into the first dungeon to find her mutt Laury, a journey which becomes all the more traumatic when the boss turns out to be her own pet, albeit in monster form. “It’s pretty brutal,” Gooden admits. “At first it was a generic monster, but I thought it’d be more emotionally affecting for it to be not just a dog but her dog. It cements the fact that she’s in this strange environment, and she has to confront these nightmares.”
Given her anxiety issues, the demo’s cliffhanger would suggest the ultimate nightmare for Thalia is confronting herself. Gooden is tight-lipped on where She Dreams Elsewhere goes from there, although he teases it will boast a similar variety in its scenarios to another of his favourite RPGs, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door: “I would just say stay tuned – it gets pretty weird!”
You get a ‘safe and sound’ message at the end of a battle, and dogs act as save points