Now look; I love a good weird game, and the recent spate of ‘liminal spaces’ games have intrigued and delighted me in the few I’ve tried. Exit 8 was a fun half hour of bizarreness, and Pools was a slow but short affair comprising of 4 (in the beta at least) levels that – while obtuse to a degree – were easy enough to suss out the goal and complete. So when Dreamcore was presented to us, I figured why not give it a go.
Well, as you’ll no doubt see from the bottom of this page, this will be my second ever non-scored review. I can’t in good faith put a number to it because, quite simply, I’m not really sure what it is. Currently consisting of two levels (with a further three to come over the next year or so), Dreamcore is a confusing mess of vagueness given a sheen of visual impressiveness that soon can’t hold our interest as we wander aimlessly yet again trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.
For the uninitiated, the liminal space genre is – in a nutshell – a way of capturing that dream-like feeling of being in a recognisable place that also feels completely alienating and confusing; a maze that feels like it loops and never ends, but also always feels like you’ve never quite been here before. When done well, it can be an effective bit of tension-filled gameplay. There are no threats other than what our own mind conjures up, and the ever impending sense of hopelessness that comes with not knowing if we’ll ever escape.
At least on that last part Dreamcore succeeds, but I’d argue that’s not a good thing to be the sole achievement of the game. Other titles give us a confusing place to explore but keep things tight so that we may succeed just as we start to lose hope. Even the most confusing Pools experience was over in 30 minutes at most. Dreamcore just seems to want to revel in expanding the areas but giving the player no extra help in escape.
The first level, Dreampools, is set in a labyrinth of interconnected pools, each room having multiple exits that lead into rooms with multiple exits that lead into…well, you get it. There are multiple floors to explore, rooms full of water that slows us down, bizarre inanimate objects to find, and – apparently – also the actual key item we need to find to escape. The problem being that this level alone has over 500 rooms, and the key item (in this case a flashlight) only appears in a random three of them out of a possible twelve. These rooms are not small either, and our running pace is painfully slow. I have spent over an hour (closer to two I’d wager) looking for one of these fucking lights, but can I find one? You may have already guessed the answer.
Full disclosure here: we were provided a ‘walkthrough’ (more of a hints guide really) with our review code, and the only reason I know the above information is from that. At no point in the game does it tell us what to look for, or any hints on how to find it. Again, supposedly the flashlights location is indicated by some jazz music playing, but I never heard a damn thing.

I could handle the slow pace and RNG if the level was smaller, or there were tell tale clues we were on the right path, but aimlessly wandering the pools with no idea if we were in the ballpark became tedious and, frankly, boring to play.
The second area, Eternal Suburbia, starts out much stronger as we can actually see our initial objective (the water tower, for those looking for a heads up). Find our path through the winding field of houses and picket fencing is easy enough, and we get a key from a table under the tower and a painting as a hint as to what to do next. Well, beyond that it gets back in to fuckery territory I’m afraid, with a winding set of houses that hide entrances to further areas, all in search of the final exit elevator. Again, I must shout out the guide we were given as it let me get so far, but I did try as much of the level as I could without it and it was a miserable experience. It’s too easy to just get lost and be off the right track with no idea, and even when I referenced the guide again I was too far gone to even know where to start.
Conclusion
At this point, I’m afraid I threw in the towel on Dreamcore. While the visuals are decent, and there’s a certain atmosphere when we first begin that borders on creepy, all to quickly it falls into the trap of giving the player no help in a vast world that isn’t fun to explore. I’m sure there will be a crowd out there who’ll dig this, but I just did not enjoy my time with Dreamcore at all outside of the initial few minutes of hope and expectation. Again, no review score from me purely because I didn’t beat either level – partly because it’s confusing and tedious, partly because I just could not take any more.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.