Systems: Windows, Linux
Release Date: TBD
Publisher: Montraluz
Developer: Montraluz
Time Spent: 56 Minutes
I am not very much an art person. I mean, I love art but don't ask me to analyze a painting and expect anything more than a couple of sentences. And then there's "modern art". . .wait no. "Modern" apparently refers to art created between 1860 - 1970, I must be thinking of "post-modern" art. No, not that either. I might be thinking of some combination of pop art, conceptualism, and minimalism. I'm not really sure. All I know is that when my family visited an art museum in DC 23 years ago (It might've been the National Gallery of Art), I enjoyed the museum until we got to the section/wing that had art that had been created in what felt like the last 10 years (so, in the 1990s) and I just lost all interest. I could look at a single Bosch or Dali painting for an hour and just be captivated the whole time. Or whatever kind of Americana folk art this is called. The point to all of this rambling is that before I started Dreamcore, I couldn't give you a great description of what it meant for a video game to be categorized as "liminal." Apparently it's the trend in art the last 5-10 years, but what that means in terms of a video game, I couldn't tell you.
Until I started writing this article. All that the "liminal" genre tag means is the sense of uneasiness that exploring a place that would normally be populated creates. So for instance, Dear Esther as you explore an uninhabited island. Or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, which I assume explores this concept as you walk through an uninhabited English countryside village after the Rapture; although I haven't played it yet. Or Gone Home where you explore and walk through your empty childhood home reading documents, letters, newspaper clippings, etc while finding out about your family's goings on for the last handful of years. I don't know, maybe those aren't accurate depictions of liminal spaces in video games, but that's how I interpret them based on the definition from Wikipedia.
To some extent, I don't feel outwardly creeped out by liminal spaces. Like, looking down an empty hallway in a hotel isn't uneasy. Yes, I've seen The Shining. But maybe you just need to hang out in a hotel hallway for an hour or two after 1 AM because you don't have your room card key.
Anyway!
Dreamcore. Specifically the first and only playable environment. What the other four environments are were not listed on the select screen, only that they would be "coming soon." First off, this game/demo looks amazing and looks damn near photo-realistic on the Steam Deck. If you're particularly anal about immersion though, you might be upset that there is no movement in the water as you walk through it, although it does prevent you from running. I actually questioned for a moment how the footage was created for me to be able to walk and look around wherever I wanted (as if I hadn't walked through a 3D space created from a real-world location before). It became clear, maybe 20 minutes in that the rooms/spaces in Dreamcore felt like they were procedurally generated, although I was still under the video game player mindset that there was some sort of progression that I needed to decode through the various markings on the walls, the shapes of the doors, and the occasional music that would creep up.
There were rooms where faint music would swell but then fade away. There were archways and doors that had images scrawled on them in black ink. There was an elevator that would would ding but the floor didn't change beyond 37. There was a flashlight on a stool. There were triangle doors with arrows scrawled above them, pointing me to go to one or the other. There were rooms that were completely dark and was prompted that I would require a flashlight to enter them. Which I had. So I did. After nearly an hour of walking through these rooms filled with pools, inflatable tubes, smiley face balls, strangely shaped pool floaties that maybe had faces on them, I decided that I was going to call it quits. Then I looked at the discussion page through the Steam Store and everything I had thought when I quit the game was somewhat accurate.
To me it felt like the entire purpose of "Dreampools" was to take a familial location and let the player explore locations that felt as if they could have been conjured in a dream. According to the Steam Discussion pages, in previous builds of the game there used to be a shadowy figure that would show up every so often in an inaccessible place, but they would not do anything, just be there to help amp up the tension and uneasiness, but were removed sometime late last year (2023) due to the developer not being happy with the animations. There also apparently is a legitimate "end" to "Dreampools," possibly something to do with a basement (maybe?)
However, there were definitely places in this game where I did feel uneasy and unnerved. When I first came upon the pool that was filled with different-sized pool floaties with what looked like eyes on them, I got goosebumps. As in the kind of goosebumps that rise from behind your ears to the top of your scalp while simultaneously running down your shoulders. All within a second or two upon entering this room. And this was well over 30 minutes into playing so I was 99% sure that nothing was going to jump out of the water and start chasing me, it was just creepy. I don't think I was trying to figure out who had placed the pool floaties in the water because someone must have placed them there because they're there and I know that I didn't place them there if someone else did that where are they now and are they watching me right now? On the most basic level, it felt like, "Well that's new and unsettling."
Now knowing that there are about 300 individual rooms that are not procedurally generated with a specific end in mind makes the thought of jumping back into "Dreampools" feel a little daunting, but only if I think of it like a traditional video game. If I think of "Dreampools" as an experience to wander through to experience a sense of unease in an amazing-looking setting, then this is exactly what it is. I am very interested though to see what the other four locations are, and the fact that I can run this at the highest visual settings on the Steam Deck is all the more appealing; the fan does kick in almost immediately and I think I could probably run the batter down in an hour, but thankfully the high-speed charger cord is long enough to reach from the power outlet to where I am laying in bed.
JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
No comments:
Post a Comment