The first game I played in Dreams was a cute Captain Toad-inspired puzzle platformer called Pip Gemwalker. It's about a Sloth who has to collect hidden gems across seven increasingly-complex levels. The second game I played was Blade Gunner, a Resogun-style twin-stick shooter with upgrades, an in-game store, and online leaderboards. After that I hopped into Art Therapy, a first-person game where your goal, as a disgruntled artist wielding a baseball bat, is to smash your way through a museum without any of the guards catching you in the act. The fourth was Shadows Dance at Olivetop Reach, a fantasy RPG with turn-based combat and an XP-based levelling system.
Each of these games is vastly different from the last, not just in terms of genre and gameplay mechanics, but their use (or disuse) of cutscenes, voice acting, art style, music, narrative, and so on. The one thing they each have in common is that they were all created using the exact same set of tools. That's Dreams in a nutshell: a platform where you can create pretty much anything you can put your mind to. Developer Media Molecule has continued the mantra of "play, create, share" that it used to define the LittleBigPlanet series and applied it to a much more ambitious concept with a significantly broader scope. Metaphorically speaking, if LittleBigPlanet is a single country, then Dreams is the entire universe. There's just so much promise and potential for the burgeoning Dreams community to create some innovative and inspired art, all by using an intuitive toolset that's made accessible via a streamlined creation suite and the use of informative hands-on tutorials. Whether these creations take the form of an hour-long video game, a short film, a simple visual spectacle, or something as simple as a sound effect that another player can use in their own project. The possibilities are endless, which I know is a tired cliché, but in Dreams--more than anywhere else--it actually applies.
There are two parts to Dreams which both branch out like roots from a tree. DreamShaping is where you can begin creating your own projects and find myriad tutorials that will teach you how. DreamSurfing, meanwhile, lets you find other people's creations and play them for yourself. It's also where you'll find Media Molecule's own creations, including Art's Dream. If you want to construct a level in LittleBigPlanet, you are always confined to the base template of a side-scrolling 3D platformer. Inevitably, some people found inventive ways to circumnavigate this template, but compared to what you can do in Dreams it's overly restrictive. To demonstrate the monumental shift between LittleBigPlanet and Dreams, Media Molecule has created a showcase of sorts, placing Art's Dream front and centre when you jump into DreamSurfing for the first time.
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