DREAMS OF ANOTHER

Pondering existence with help from an assault rifle

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From its inception, the PixelJunk series has been Q-Games’ way of bringing the simple arcade nature of retro games to the HD era. All are distinctive, but Dreams Of Another is perhaps the most unusual of the bunch yet, which may explain why it forgoes the PixelJunk name, relegated here to a splash screen. It has an arcade-like immediacy, nonetheless, as our striped-pyjama-clad avatar wields an assault rifle. With years of playing thirdperson shooters under our belt, we instinctively squeeze the left trigger to aim, then pull the right trigger to shoot. And, yes, the weapon fires, but the result is no confirmed kill or score boost. Rather, it’s something with a more philosophical leaning.

The underlying theme here is summarised by the maxim ‘No destruction without creation’, attributed to thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche and the Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga. However, the game’s writer and director, Baiyon, traces his own early experience of this concept back to a project during one of his middle school’s culture festivals. “I teamed up with a friend and we made this weird sculpture with cardboard, then at the end of the day when the festival was over, we needed to clean it all up,” he explains. “I don’t know why, I just started punching it and destroying it. Then my friend started kicking me and a fight started. Then the teacher came over and he slapped my face, yelling at me, ‘Are you making something just to destroy it?’” Despite emerging from a rush of juvenile behaviour, those words stuck with Baiyon, even as he developed into a multimedia artist. Eventually he began contributing art and music to PixelJunk titles, before joining Q-Games full-time, and only now with Dreams Of Another has he decided to really run with this theme. And what better way to convey the concept of destruction than with an assault rifle?