The games people are making in Dreams already, a week in [Edit: a fair few of these games were made in the closed beta earlier this year – sorry for overlooking this], are amazing. Someone’s recreating P.T., for crying out loud! Another person is remaking Dark Souls interiors and they’re pretty convincing. Someone else has made a kind of Guitar Hero while another person has quite a lot of an RPG up and running, and Scrolls in the title! There’s a 4×4 off-road buggy, erm, trip, in more than one sense of the word; a moody supernatural first-person shooter; Super Mario Bros; Super Mario 64, Kirby… Really anything you can think of to pay homage to, there’s an homage to.
But my favourite of all of them appears to be an original work and it’s one for the connoisseur – pretty highbrow stuff. It’s called Oi, You, What You Lookin’ At? and it’s a boxing game as clumsy and ridiculous as Gang Beasts. Its real crowning glory is its theme song, which plays as soon as the fight begins begins. “Oi, you, what you lookin’ at?” it goes, in the voice of someone who would give you something to look at. “What some do ya? Have summa that!” Inspired.
1 of 5 Caption Attribution From left to right: community creations Fret Star, Prometheus, Dark Dungeon, Separate Reality, and Slayer Scrolls.
There’s loads already, then, all gathered neatly in the game and online at indreams.me. Shouldn’t be surprising given the nurturing Media Molecule gave its LittleBigPlanet creative community, and they’re back in droves in Dreams. Yet all of their work has a flaw in common: it’s unfinished, which is understandable, given how long the early access has been available and how much work is involved – I tried the creator for an hour or so and broke a sweat just moving stairs around.