Do yourself a favour: Go to the PlayStation Store right now and spend $10 on Dreams. It's a ludicrously low price for one of the best games on PlayStation, but the sale ends on October 13. Playable on both PS4 and PS5, there are two distinct sides to Dreams. The first is an incredibly deep, easy to pick up creation tool, which you can use to make your own games. People have used this thing to make RPGs, beat-’em-ups, open-world games, driving sims, puzzlers, platformers, and just about every genre imaginable—not to mention short films, music videos, and digital art. It's awe-inspiring how powerful the tool is, and the many wild, wonderful things the game's army of dedicated players has made with it.
But if you don't care about making your own games, that's cool. Dreams is worth buying just to play other people's games. It's been out for over a year now, and its library of user-created content is absolutely vast. Throw a random keyword into the search bar—weird, scary, challenging, funny, sad, whatever—and you'll find a selection of clever, imaginative, well-made games to play or vignettes to watch. One minute you're playing a game where a frustrated artist runs around an art gallery smashing the exhibits with a baseball bat while avoiding security guards; the next you're spinning the camera around an impossibly detailed, realistic full English breakfast that someone, somehow, made entirely on a PlayStation.
I spent the morning with Dreams, and in that time I played an incredibly atmospheric Alien-inspired first-person horror game, watched an army of giant ants destroy a city, got freaked out in a surreal museum full of weird statues, explored a landscape where I could change the seasons at will, leapt through time and saw the city of Seattle across millions of years of history, wandered around the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks, stepped inside a Japanese ink wash painting, and, well, you get the idea. That's only a tiny, miniscule fraction of the sheer volume of stuff packed into Dreams, which makes that $10 seem even more preposterous. There are bad creations out there, but a well curated front-end makes them easy to avoid.
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It's gloriously easy to find and jump between games too thanks to a slick, breezy interface and super fast load times, at least on PS5. I can't vouch for the PS4 version. You can hop in and out of creations effortlessly, leaving a thumbs up if you enjoyed it, which makes exploring the archives a real delight. Whenever I fire up Dreams I have no idea what's in store for me and that's incredibly exciting. There's such a wealth of experiences to discover, from fully blown games and throwaway playthings, to pieces of art and surreal audiovisual experiments. The level of quality is frequently surprising too. There are charming, scrappy creations, and I love them, but also some that feel like they were made by pro developers.
Dreams is a remarkable thing. It's a joyous celebration of imagination and creativity, and one of the best collections of indie games around. The creation aspect might be off-putting to anyone who doesn't have the time to commit to something like that—but trust me, you don't have to lift a finger. Dive deep into that mountain of community creations and you'll lose hours to it without realising. You don't even have to search that hard for good stuff: The menus are bursting with community picks, games selected by developer Media Molecule, and game jam entries to make sure you see the very best of what Dreams has to offer. If you have $10 to spare, you'll definitely get your money's worth—and then some.