“…a world of fantasy which attempts to set you free.”
My Dream is an upcoming independent and crowd funded sandbox world builder which aims to inspire and set imaginations free as “an engaging game the whole family can play”. At first glance, it looks like another Minecraft-style game which is attempting to jump on the current popularity bandwagon. With a gallery of screenshots showing block structures and vast open worlds to play with, your first instinct may be to ask “well what’s new about this then?”, but if you look closer you can see the differences which make this game something different, and which have brought budding fans to provide well over the game’s $100,000 Kickstarter target to make it a reality.
The most obvious difference between this and, for the sake of making clear comparisons throughout this preview, Minecraft is that the world is not made of blocks. A closer look at the media being used to show off this fancy new title will allow you to see an entirely different artistic take on the world around the block structures which you can build. Things are not exactly high definition here, but they are sort of perplexed, bright, colourful… dreamlike I suppose. Everything is a little over-exaggerated in its brightness and colour, and it makes the whole word stand out in a disturbingly happy and free way. Even the sky looks incredible; it is a world which looks almost too perfect to be real, but perhaps with the underlying idea of this being like a dream this may be exactly what the developers are going for.
The game is played from a first-person perspective, and essentially you have the abilities to mine and place blocks in the world at your disposal. It may be more accurate however to describe it something along the lines of being able to create and destroy at will using what can only be described as your God-Gauntlet. I should perhaps mention that this is not what the developers have called it in game, but given the power it appears to give you, it is about the most accurate description you can get. Shooting a laser out of your arm, you can create and destroy land at will through “mining”, and a number of blocks and objects are at your disposal to create the world of your dreams and whatever masterpieces may lie within it. It sounds fantastic, however things are maybe a little too simplistic at present. You can destroy and create the world, but this is not a particularly precise mechanic and it is hard to perfect what you are trying to do. The game in its current form also has a little trouble keeping up with you, which is likely down to its beta stage of development but it makes it difficult to feel as free at the moment as you want to feel.
The game also incorporates a player-influenced role playing element to it, allowing you to build your world and create an adventure within it for other players to not only try and complete, but to edit, enhance and improve upon with their own ideas. Essentially, you are given the chance to share your dreams, which is a relatively rare idea in gaming. You are often able to create levels within predetermined parameters or allow others to enter your worlds, but rarely are you given the chance to create anything that you can imagine and then present it to someone else in this form. Some work is still needed to perfect this before the game’s final release, but the idea is nothing less than wonderful, and could do the game well as a unique selling point which truly sets it aside from similar titles. Some may view it as simply an alternative to allowing others into your world to play with it, however given the style of the world and the nature of the things you can do, this is something quite different. You are presenting a dream, an idea, to other players; something a little more than a Minecraft-style story server is being offered, and it is good.
My Dream however will not suit every gamer out there. To some, like myself, it may still feel a little limited, a little closed; there is still more that can be desired to do in order to feel as though you have been completely set free. The merits of the game in general however are clear. It is certainly worth giving it a go, as it is an interesting and indeed a surprisingly fresh and new idea given its similarities to other titles. It is certainly a world of fantasy which attempts to set you free. Sadly, it is not my dream, but it may well be yours, and so it is certainly worth giving it a go just to see if what you find there is for you. And while I may say this about the game now, I look forward to playing it when it is finished, just to see if that extra bite of freedom which I so desire appears and a sandbox game that can give me what I really want is created…
Checkout MyDream Here
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