Dreamview Weekly Roundup #4
26/03/2021
Our fourth entry in this series means it’s been a whole entire month of the Dreamview Weekly Roundup! Neat. We’re having a wonderful time writing increasingly bizarre things alongside our recommendations for creations that have caught our eye in the Dreamiverse lately, safe in the knowledge that it’s probably just us in here, talking to ourselves. Flip flop apple sauce!
Wait - people are still reading this? Uh-oh. Please ignore everything we just said. Plus all the made-up words in the last bit of the article. We’re professionals, we swear. Here are our totally legit and extremely cool thoughts about fantastic stuff to play, see, do and hear in Dreams this weekend...
Metro Street Racer - California Coast
by atheistsw and animeboy0021
Feeling cooped up lately? The latest entry in the popular Metro Street Racer series has the cure. A sumptuously sunny stretch of road sweeps along the Pacific Coast Highway - and through the mountains, if you go left at the fork in the road - for you to enjoy. The handling is undemanding, sitting comfortably somewhere between realistic and arcadey with subtle use of rumble, and the lighting is on another level entirely (more than once we find ourselves squinting at the sun bouncing off the ocean). It’s a real journey, too, set across a track of such marvellous scale that the time of day progresses as you speed along - until you eventually pull into Santa Monica, streetlights glittering in the night. Freedom, bottled.
by Mezzyartiis
This 2D rhythm game caused a minor commotion on social media recently - it’s not hard to see why. It’s utterly charming to look at - hand-sketched in flecks, animated in a charismatic traditional style, and stained with tea and coffee-coloured tones. Then there’s the delightful premise: you must push buttons on the left or right side of the controller to have your barista chuck croissants into the mouths of cats (single beats) and dogs (which always come in pairs) doing mid-air somersaults. Rhythm Heaven meets the aesthetic of an indie visual novel.
by Fleckromancer
Ooh, we love free samples! Oh, okay, Fleckromancer - we see what you did there. Cool trick, buddy. Joke’s on you - we do in fact love this initially simple-seeming space adventure, in which you play a tiny astronaut exploring similarly diminutive planet-islands. Some harbour alien creatures, others exciting new scientific materials to collect, and a few may even offer puzzles to solve - but the common factor is that they’re all randomly generated. It’s basically a mini No Man’s Sky. Made by - no joke - a different Sean Murray. Insert that one GIF of the other Sean Murray’s mind being blown... here.
by Hypertronik
Making music is a kind of ritual: placing a series of sounds in a particular order to conjure a particular feeling, or mark out a moment in time as significant. Synthetic Ritual is an excellent name for this EP, then, which blends together house, EDM and more to create a pulsing futuristic soundtrack that’s just begging to be attached to a cyberpunk action game - but also stands alone as a professionally-presented listening experience.
by simora2873
When we first saw this one, a bunch of unintelligible gibberish left our mouth as our brain struggled to keep up. Sadly, seeing as though ‘HWEH?’, ‘BOOG?’ and ‘AYOOP?’ aren’t officially recognised in the Oxford English Dictionary - yet - we’re going to have to find better words to describe the brilliance of this Catherine-inspired, block-pushing puzzler. For one, it’s the spitting image of a retro PlayStation game, rendered in fine pixellation and some truly artisanal polygons. Secondly, this is a remarkably well-balanced game set across 128 levels, in addition to regularly throwing in new mechanical twists to keep us on our toes. Lastly, every last speck of Yggdrahell was created by simora2873 and simora2873 alone - an absolutely BURGULENT feat if we do say so ourselves. (Sorry, that last one just kind of slipped out.)
Want an easy way to view all of these creations in one convenient collection? Check out the playable edition of this week's Dreamview Weekly Roundup right here in Dreams!