The Cardboard Dream Machine

In these times of high polygon hypnotics and lucid dreamlike sprite animations, it’s refreshing when a game like The Dream Machine is winning awards with the most primitive of graphic environments. The Dream Machine is a new point-and-click adventure game made almost entirely out of clay and cardboard. It reached the final of the Independent Game Festival, has won two other awards already for its art, and is available online in an episodic format. The brain child of self-proclaimed Swedish nerds, Erik Zaring and Anders Gustafsson, The Dream Machine is causing a stir in the independent games community for its immersive storyline and relentless innovation.

The story focusses on a young couple – Victor and Alicia – who are awaiting the birth of their first child after recently moving into a new apartment. As they attempt to make themselves at home, Victor discovers a hidden surveillance camera in the bedroom. Mr Morton, their landlord, is grilled for the intrusion as Victor rifles through his flat. During his investigations, Victor discovers a machine that gives the Morton family remote access to the sleeping minds of those it watches. The landlord’s guilt at attempting to secretly chart people’s dreams proves too much for him. He tries to shut the machine down for good, but it manages to take on a life of its own, turning on Mr Morton and killing him. Victor must now enter the dreams of the apartment blocks inhabitants to cut off the murderous dream machines power supply, in a bid to save the lives of his pregnant wife and their unborn child.

As far as adventure games go, The Dream Machine has a plot that promises to be more intricate and thought provoking than those of recent times. The eerie and unsettling visuals of the games environments adds massively to this, creating a sense of lurking dread in every dark papier-mâché corner that Victor has to explore in order to save his family. The art of making something so gritty and almost noire like out of cardboard, clay, lollypop sticks and even old socks, is something I really have to take my hat off to.

I managed to speak with the creators of The Dream Machine to find out what possessed them to make such a time consuming game. “We both love the aesthetics of traditional stop-motion animation, and dearly miss it. Most games are created using a standard asset pipeline, and for good or bad, that tends to leave a mark on the end result. A lot of games have a similar look to them.” Anders told me. I wondered, naively, why a game that takes such hard graft is being sold independently, as opposed to being distributed through a commercial publisher. “Publishers? Do people still use those?” they laughed. “Publishers are too risk-averse and only want to make the same game over and over again. It was an option we never even considered.” Their refreshingly eccentric attitude is something which no doubt added to the inspiration for The Dream Machine, that and hallucinogens. “While at animation school, I read a lot about John C Lilly and his experiments using LSD and ketamine. He had this notion that he was visiting an alternate reality during his drug-induced hallucinations – a place with a coherent geography,” said Anders, enthusiastically. “He started drawing maps of what he had encountered, noting down things like landmarks, geographical features and coastlines. He thought that he would be able to slowly chart this new reality. To me, that idea just sounded so naive and beautiful. I had to make something of it. In our game we approach dreams in a similar way.”

With a game that takes three days to hand craft each room, inspiration from recreational drug quests, and an aesthetic from “polish film posters and Cronenberg movies”; The Dream Machine looks to be an adventure game quite literally in a mind of its own.

The highly anticipated third chapter will be released later this month.

Recent Posts on Games

• What's happened to British gaming?
• Up & away with Ace Combat: Assault Horizon
• If your yeds aw muggl't up...
• Prime Minister’s Questions – The Game
• Games review roundup: Motorstorm Apocalypse; Moon Diver; WWE All Stars; The 3rd Birthday