The first impressions I had for Dreams were that the toolset was impressive but that kind of thing wasn't for me, and the Media Molecule content at the time was fine but severely lacking. Things have changed massively in my three years away and if you're not into creation, I'd recommend looking at the games that MM have created and highlighted as there are some really interesting looking experiences there. One of these was Tren, which launched last week, a delightful little puzzler where you need to make your way across various wooden train-set levels to the goal.

A lot of concepts are crammed in here and while some are occasionally overused of not hugely fun (sorry Cren), the majority are well designed and your movement as the train is simple while feeling natural. You have a free moving camera for 95% of levels which is fine but it can occasionally have a mind of its own, zooming in when you don't want it to, preventing you from seeing up ahead. A minor frustration normally but when you're up against a time limit it can lead to situations where it's hard to adjust and you miss hazards, necessitating a restart or reset to track. That said, it's a rare problem and the overall challenge ramps up quite nicely throughout, with some intricate and almost thrilling levels coming your way towards the very end of the game.

The set dressing is wonderfully cozy and all the paraphernalia strewn across the levels and hub world (three rooms in a house) really hit those nostalgia buttons. I also really liked the music - chill in hubs and more dedicated puzzle levels, but playfully intense where attempting to beat the clock is involved. Alongside a couple more specific MM throwbacks, it really made me miss what that studio can do in their own dedicated games.

And this last point really got me thinking about how the MM (and some user-generated) games that have been made in Dreams should be classified. These creations are made in Dreams and for sure I spent the hours in this software to play them, but they can also be fully fledged experiences (I spent 9 hours with Tren) with Dreams being more akin to an engine at that point. So I feel a bit strange about how to log, rate and review this and other Dreams games that I may try in the future - and there are a few that look really interesting - as while I'm technically playing Dreams, I'm also not. I know a line has to be drawn somewhere but it feels really fuzzy to me here.

Due to the huge toolset and variety of content that can be created which spans a huge range of genres and tone, I think Dreams in its own little world of almost being its own platform - a normal level creator this title is not - and I find it a bit disappointing that there's no way to talk about these games on BL in standalone terms. The record will say that I replayed Dreams with a playtime of 9 hours, but that really doesn't tell the whole story.

A neat creation suite game that still feels very pandemic-era. It's not my type of thing, but it's a cool concept that beats a lot of failed attempts at doing a Roblox-like style game on consoles. Dreams is currently in its waning days, but even if it were still hot, I'm not quite sure I would have stuck around for even another couple of days, it loses my interest quickly, but I also recognize there's an audience for it, and it adopts a lot of the best creation parts of the Little Big Planet series.

I think if I was a kid I just wouldn't need other video games. I love to just boot this up and search something random and see what comes up. One time I played a Call of Duty: Zombies-style horde FPS where all the enemies were Sonic.exe. The very first time I got to the homepage the first thing I saw was a Captain Toad fangame. My only complaint is that even though there's a lot of creativity and effort on display in a lot of the games made in Dreams, I don't think I've played a single one that actually felt good to control.

I have a lasting interest in game creation platforms like this, but also in games as smaller scale experiences. I grew up spending a lot of time with Roblox and the Little Big Planet series, but also with flash games. The possibility of making things yourself, and of other people seeing those things is really cool! Playing other people's little projects, flaws and all, has always felt more intimate to me. I would argue that smaller games make a better case for "games as art" than any big budget M rated drama made to mimic prestige television.

The home of those kinds of games has really shifted over time, though. I don't want to get too negative here, but it's really sad to me to see platforms like have Flash died or how the mobile game market has shifted to prioritize games that are engineered to be addictive and profitable.

To me Dreams represents that long gone world from my adolescence. A place to share what you've made, and to be entertained and inspired by what other people have made. It's incredible the things people have made in it! Some of them are really good and stand separate from the Dreams platform, and others are pretty terrible! Both categories have their place here. It isn't perfect as a platform, and it retains some of the social media type elements that also affected the Little Big Planet series. "Remakes" and fandom content tend to be popular and get perpetuated since they inherently have a wider audience. I might be in the minority here but I find it really interesting to see how the structure of a platform like this can affect the sorts of things people make. I like playing all sorts of things here for that reason alone, regardless of quality! It's a little ecosystem and I find that just as engaging as the actual games. I could talk forever about aspects of the community and the game itself that I find interesting, or even just about specific games, but I'm not very good at writing and there's just too much to cover!

If you're interested in video games as a medium and as a vehicle for self expression, I would highly recommend giving Dreams a shot. It's not doing something new, but it's easily the best of its kind.

I imagine Dreams is kind of similar to Mario Maker in a way, but less popular. Dreams however has a lot more variety when it comes to creation. With Mario Maker, you are limited to just level design, but with Dreams, you have a lot more options. You can create entire games from scratch with level design, sound design, custom elements/models. It also isn't just games, you can make animations too and some of it is really impressive. It's still user created content so a sizeable amount of stuff will be kind of trash, but I would say a good chunk is quality content. I played a Kaiju destruction sim, watched a really cool animation about like a bird robot thing, and played a bit of the Dream dev teams fully blown game they made in the editor. Games like this and Mario Maker are the things that end up inspiring young people and others to become creators like level designers, artists, game devs, etc. It's kind of cool actually.

Dreams is an incredible, unique game that you should check out for numerous reasons, but I'm going to specifically review Tren here.

Tren, a game built within another game (by the devs of the game themselves), is one of the best games of 2023. I easily sunk something like 10 hours into it and completed the full game, 100%ing too. It's the most impressive creation I've ever encountered in Dreams, and could easily be a standalone release.

It took minutes for the question of "how could a game that forces you to stay on tracks be that fun?" to be answered, and answered again, and again and again. The gameplay is straight up joyous. It brought back memories of playing with the wooden train tracks I had as a kid. I had a constant smile on my face and was stoked to see the little train do any sort of trick, and broke out laughing whenever the physics worked in some unexpected way, flinging pieces across the scenery.

The scenery, by the way, is SO meticulously detailed that you could spend the whole game in free cam mode and still have a great time. It's akin to an "I Spy" book, where little scenes built from models and household objects played out across the landscape. I had to slow down and start playing through the time trial levels without watching the timer because I just wanted to check out everything across the ~100 levels.

Because there are like 100 levels! And new, interesting mechanics showed up again and again. Even by the time you are at the last few levels, Tren has still more wonderful surprises built with so much care, just to be featured in one or two levels. The same goes for the music, there are dozens of tracks and you will be hearing new ones right till the end. The music perfectly suits the fun-loving mood of the game. I've started listening to it outside of playing the game, because it's honestly just that good.

If you have Dreams, I can't recommend you play Tren enough. If you don't have Dreams, Tren is a great reason why you should pick it up. What a blast!

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with LittleBIGPlanet 3. I had always been interested in games that featured creating tools, and still am, and I was sadly first introduced to the LBP series after the PS3 era had ended and couldn’t easily experience the original two games which are arguably better in many ways.

As a fan of the LBP series and the tools originally introduced by the team at Media Molecule (yes, I know they did not develop the 3rd entry) I had been looking forward to Dreams for years. It felt like a natural progression of the idea Media Molecule had first introduced to the world with the LBP games. I ended up buying it launch day, and only up until recently did it manage to keep me occupied with the constant stream of impressive material the community was making.

Dreams has a very dense creation mode, but one that’s still pretty simple to use. Anyone can make a character, song, model, etc. and if they allow it, anyone can use that element in their game, animation, etc. It’s a simple system, and one that allowed for some genuinely fantastic experiences on the game.

Though Dreams was flooded with memes and very low-quality creations from the get-go, Media Molecules’ heavy engagement with what was being made on Dreams in its early years allowed actual quality creations to not get overshadowed by these things. There are a number of very impressive creations on here, that I still return to even despite my inactivity on the game most of the time now. The Opposite Day adventure games which were crammed with meta jokes, the Pig Detective point-and-click series that starred Troy fucking Baker in such an obscure role it’s not even on his Wikipedia (it is really him, he’s had in-game interviews and the like), entire movies and RPGs. Some very passionate stuff came out of this game and it’s clear Media Molecule got what they wanted- people who wanted to make things, well, made things! And it was lovely. People formed communities, events were frequently hosted by users, even Media Molecule occasionally did stuff like collaborations, games, and several annual things. But eventually, for a multitude of reasons, the well of creativity in Dreams started to dry up.

Like many creations platforms, users eventually lost motivation to use Dreams as frequently, which resulted in less engagement on both the creation and viewing sides of the community. However UNLIKE other platforms that experienced this which then got NEW waves of players like its predecessor LBP, barely any people entered Dreams to fill in the shoes of those who came before. This is very likely the fault of Sony, who did almost nothing to advertise the game despite how revolutionary the LBP series was and still is, with its main character even being a major mascot for the PlayStation to this day.

And eventually, after hundreds of hours of playing and creating and chatting with friends I had made in the game, like many others I too faded away. And eventually so did Media Molecule, who put limitations on the servers in late 2023, giving users a cap to how many saves they can make in their creations. The Dream had died.

Today, for the first time in several months, I logged on to Dreams. The few friends that had remained in my last visit were either also gone or barely active, and I feel they were likely in the same situation as me. On the browsing (or “Dreamsurfing”) section of the game I noticed several things right away. The featured things were almost entirely old creations being re-featured from a lack of new quality content. Actual quality content had barely any views, sometimes barely scratching the hundred as opposed to previous tens of thousands. And the most striking thing to me is that the only really popular new thing on the platform anymore, was an animation series featuring the LBP protagonist Sackboy in low-quality, meme-filled, random-humor situations. You can probably take something poetic out of the fact that Dreams, a natural successor to LittleBIGPlanet and one that unfortunately died far earlier than its predecessor, only hangs onto life by a shitpost series starring the protagonist of those previous games. But I’m not a poet, and I don’t want to analyze an animation series where actual shit noises play whenever people move. It is painful to see how far it has fallen.

And yet then I tried making something. The creation tools, all those things made by users many of whom are long gone, still hold up just as well (if not better thanks to updates) as they did on launch day. Making things was still such a thrill. And that’s the tragedy of Dreams- a community that faded away with no new generation to step in. Like real dreams, it is an adventure, a portal to new, infinite worlds from the deepest fixtures of the mind, but can be forgotten just as easily as it was conceived.