When I was playing a dreamer‘s demo in June, I thought, this could be something special. It appeared to be a game about a f ailing game developer, presented using a combination of point-and-click and programming puzzles, but in an accessible way. And that’s it! Hooray! In fact, it’s far more beautiful, compelling, and superbly put together than it first appeared.
Frank is a game developer who had an indie hit, a VR multiplayer MMO called ProxyLife that was a big deal for a while. But now it’s struggling, player counts are dwindling, and the lack of a steady flow of new features is demoralizing its player base. At the same time, Frank works as a soulless freelancer (a situation familiar to almost all indie developers), helps a AAA game implement stricter DRM, or lowers the statistical chances of players receiving in-game currency.
However, none of this is directly told. Instead, through what appear to be dream sequences, we learn about the story and the motivations behind its creation ProxyLife, in advanced sections where Frank can edit the code of the objects in the world around him. Here, you can use the game’s pseudocode (a simplified version of C# that even I can understand) to reprogram a duck to meow like a cat, or, more usefully, control a lever to make it shoot a distant locked gate opens.
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In those parts of the real world where Frank works surrounded by overdue bills and threatening letters, this programming is confined to his computer. Here you are tasked with making these mercenary changes to the AAA game while attempting to pick up your own pieces. As someone who has never managed to get ahead with games that ask me to learn and implement code, I’m happy to report that that’s not the case here. This is intelligently designed to work like jigsaw puzzles while secretly teaching me the basics of code structure. But then, brilliantly, it mostly just teaches me how to dodge.
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There is a a lot of that’s smart a dreamer, from its narrative structure to its ridiculously beautiful pixel graphics, but the way you have to solve puzzles with Coder Bodging is just awesome. Need to remove this feature that gives new players 100 coins? Change the value of a small CoinRewardTier from another section of the game code, then copy and paste it into the NewPlayerData such that StartingCoins = CoinRewardTier.Small. Sure, this will likely break something else elsewhere, but it does the job for now.
This idea of managing to cut corners permeates all of the puzzles in the game, makes it delightfully honest, and brilliantly teaches bad habits. So many coding games are so exhaustingly valuable and pretend to benefit the player with wondrous insights – not here. Here, in this superbly designed game, even the programming puzzles borrow the daunting tone of trying to stay afloat during a disaster.
The story is told in a very disorderly manner. The introductory game I gave you above is where it feels like things start, but as you play you jump across the timeline in a way that is very deliberately underexplained. For the most part this works very well, but there are situations where I felt confused. There’s also a pretty pivotal moment that’s a little underplayed in a cutscene, which makes me pretty insecure about what just happened. I mean, I figured it out, but it would have been nicer if it was explained a little better.
My only other criticism of the game is how slow Frank moves when going up and down stairs. This is something you often do to him as he traverses the side-scrolling 2D scenes, and it allows for the game’s beautiful moments of changing location as you enter a door or climb a flight of stairs. But he Yes, really takes time and it starts to drag. But damn when This is my main complaint, you know you have a great game here.
The art is just spectacular, especially the lighting and flowering of these pixel characters, made even better by excellent voice acting and a really nice soundtrack. This is so damn solid.
It’s also a lot longer than I expected. At a point where I thought things were coming to an end, I watched a YouTube playthrough (to revisit the confusing scene I mentioned above) and learned I was barely halfway through. So I’m not done at this point, but I’ve played enough to know how much I wish you would too. This is something very special, a fascinating and moving exploration of the drivers behind so much indie development and how incredibly unhealthy and toxic it can become. And yet it also feels full of hope, full of potential of creation. And somehow it even has an idiot like me solving programming puzzles.
a dreamer is out now on Steam and GOG.
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