Media Moleculehas announced it will beending live-service support for Dreamslater this year as it moves onto other projects. As much as I admire the whimsical creative tools the studio has provided for years now, it felt doomed from the start, only striking a chord with a niche audience while general consumers seldom seemed to care.
Ever since it was first unveiled back in 2013 alongside thePlayStation 4, Dreams existed as an almost ethereal concept. It would move beyond the relatively constrained limitations seen inLittleBigPlanetand offer means to create interactive experiences with far more freedom. I watched as an early demo saw developers sculpt trees and characters using the PlayStation Move controllers, forcing their creations to dance before us with newfound levels of rhythm.
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It was amazing back then, but after several years of similar demos and updates it grew a bit tiresome, so when the actual game rolled around in February 2020 it was both stunning and polarising. Critics admired the brief solo campaign Media Molecule had conjured up to show us what Dreams was capable of, but amidst this praise sat a begrudging realisation that for casual players there wasn’t much of a game here at all. Those with the patience to hammer through its tutorials and the talent to make use of its mechanics could create some magical ideas, all for us to browse through them with a feeling of utter indifference. Dreams is ideal for occasional moments of spectacle, although it never quite graduated beyond that.
Discussion around the game seemed to operate like clockwork. Every couple of weeks I would come across a viral tweet along the lines of, ‘Can you believe this was made with Dreams?’ only to be shown a raging kaiju stomping around a sprawling metropolis or a Soulsborne game with more simplistic visuals and combat. There are so many worthwhile gems to be found in Dreams that people worked days, weeks, months, or even years to create, and these individuals have bright futures ahead of them. It’s a shame their best achievements thus far are housed within an ecosystem Sony never bothered to market.
Viral sensations aside, Media Molecule would continue to hold creator competitions and get involved with its community, operating within an echochamber that seemingly had no interest in appealing to new players or explaining the potential of Dreams on a wider landscape. The engagement is minimal, and not nearly enough to sustain Sony bankrolling one of its bigger studios to work on a single project for what feels like an entire decade. Prior to Dreams, Media Molecule’s last game was in 2015 with Tearaway Unfolded, an expanded edition of its 2013 game Tearaway. That’s not a great deal of return across ten years.
Moving on was inevitable, and Dreams didn’t make the medium-changing splash many of us were hoping for. It was a fleeting joy to surf through random levels or search up zany terms to see if anyone had made a stage based on your favourite anime, but these sessions often amounted to a few minutes before we put the controller down and did something else. You have to admire the ambition of Dreams and what it hoped to accomplish, yet I don’t think it was focused nor a good fit for the console it called home. I know people who bought it and played the base campaign before feeling short-changed because the idea of browsing a few curated levels didn’t feel worthwhile, and they sure as hell weren’t going to check back next month to see what Media Molecule decided to highlight.
LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway traded on creative freedom but also had substantial enough single-player experiences that would leave the majority of us satisfied. We tend to look back on these games fondly because they balanced a traditional gaming experience with a more freeform approach to creativity that didn’t take away from those with no interest in bending the game to their whims. It was balanced, and for all its life I don’t think Dreams ever was.
