Dream Catcher VR Demo review: a relaxing puzzle in VR

Yesterday evening I wanted to try one of the demos available for the Steam VR Fest, and since the guys and gals of CM Games suggested I try their new game Dream Catcher VR, I did it. And as you can imagine, I’m here telling you my experience with it.

Dream Catcher VR

Dream Catcher VR is a new game by CM Games. It is currently available as a free demo during the Steam VR Fest, to then launch in Early Access in the upcoming times. The expected release date for the full game is May 2023.

The studio describes the game this way:

Dream Catcher VR is a relaxing puzzle adventure in the soulful world of Nappia – the land of dreams. Meet characters from varied backgrounds and shape their dreams – search for hidden parts, mend fractured memories, clear your path, and bring colors to the surroundings.

Our heroine finds herself on a mission to – no less than – help people from different timelines by shaping their dreams in her own unique way only to face and solve her own dilemma. Set out on a therapeutic journey – prepare to search for hidden pieces, put them together, clear your path, and bring colors to the environment.
[… ]
Peek into the dreamers’ subconscious. Get to know their stories. Explore Nappia and find your answers – why you got hired as a Dream Catcher in the first place. Meet cute and squishy inhabitants of Nappia that work hard for us to have our dreams every night.

In the demo, there is almost none of the story factor and you just get to play the first level of the game. So I can happily describe everything without any risks of spoilers.

Gameplay

As soon as I launched the game, I found myself in a very colored toonish world with soothing music playing in the background, so I immediately understood the mood of the application. I started a very short tutorial, in which a cute creature taught me how to interact with the game. During the whole game, there is no one talking, it’s all about sounds and visual cues, and the tutorial is no exception: the character spoke with me using callouts that inside had animated sequences showing me what I should have done. The tutorial anyway didn’t teach me anything special: I could teleport and move with smooth locomotion, and also interact through raycast with objects. In particular, I could use raycast to grab objects, and I could also take two parts of an object in my two hands, put them together, and if I was composing them in the right way, the two parts would merge to become only one object. During the tutorial, I found and assembled four parts, which in the end shaped a full golden apple. As soon as I did it, the cute creature helping me became happy and the tutorial was over.

After that, I was told that I should visit the dreams of a 16-year-old guy and was teleported into another space, much bigger but with the same graphical style and the same cute creatures, to start the real game. I started moving around, and at a certain point, I found two pieces of something, and the callout of the creature next to me hinted that they were pieces of something like a low tube. I tried to assemble them, but I couldn’t do it, so I analyzed them a bit more and I realized that I needed more parts to actually build a functioning tube. I started so going around to find the missing pieces, and while walking, I found a pile of books on the floor with a bookshelf close to them. The cute creature next to them had a callout hinting me to point the controllers at the books, so I did, and the more I swept the book pile with my controllers, the more the book flew towards the bookcase until all of them were put in order inside it. At that point, I could read on top of it a sentence from the thoughts of the guy that was dreaming: it was something like “I don’t like going to school” (me neither, by the way). Solving the puzzle didn’t give me anything useful and this left me… puzzled (pun very intended).

I kept looking around, and I embarked on my journey in finding all the pieces of the tube. It was longer than I expected, and the whole level took me around 45 minutes. The pieces of the tube were probably around 10, and they were scattered around a small world of little islands connected by bridges. While navigating around this place, I kept finding the bookshelves with the books around them, and every time I did the work of putting everything in place, I was rewarded with a thought from the dreaming guy. That helped in giving a bit of context to what I was doing, and reading all the small sentences, I realized (spoiler alert) that the 16yo guy didn’t like to study, but he liked music, and this is why I was assembling a tube: doing music was his dream, and composing the parts of his dream, I was helping him in realizing it.

There were some elements in the scene that were whitish, and I had to touch them to make them colored. One of these parts was the bridges, and it took me a while to understand that I had to touch them to become colored so that I could walk on them. Of the 45 minutes of my gameplay, at least 10 were lost because of my misunderstanding of the control system (as we’ll see in the dedicated chapter).

The game is technically a puzzle game because you have to find the various parts of the dreams (the tube in this case) and understand how to assemble them (by using the reference images that are scattered around the place). But I’m not totally sure that the puzzle is the main activity of this experience. I think that relaxation is the main purpose. I say that because the environment is so cute and calm, the music so soothing, and all the activities are very lightweight: just assembling a simple puzzle, touching elements, and moving the controllers around books. I remember a psychologist told me in the past that the best relaxing experiences in VR are not the ones in which you are a passive viewer, but the ones in which there are lightweight interactions, so the user is more engaged with the relaxation. And this experience fits exactly in this description. I’ve found it a very pleasant experience to play during the evening after a long day of work: if we remove the bugs given by the fact this game is in early access (e.g. sometimes the books didn’t get easily into their place) and my misunderstanding of the control system which led to some frustrations, the experience was for me very relaxing and I could play it without thinking much.

You can see 30 minutes of me playing Dream Catcher VR here below:

Multimedia Elements

As I’ve said, Dream Catcher VR is an experience with cute and relaxing visuals and sounds. Everything has been designed with this in mind: the characters around you are cute, the environment seems to come from a cartoon for small kids (the shader is also clearly toonish), and the music is soothing. When you perform an action, you see some nice particle effects (e.g. stars) going around you, and a sparkling sound. Even when you perform an error in assembling the tube, the error sound effect is funny. The multimedia elements are all very coherent, and this contributes to creating the relaxation mood I described before.

A detail I clearly noticed is how the world is very low poly and with flat colors (almost no textures): this is a game that is very lightweight for the graphics card, and I’m pretty sure it will run very well also on standalone devices. I so clearly expect also a Quest launch of it.

The quality of the elements is good, both on the visual and the audio side, but I also have to say that, given the chosen style, it was not an impossible mission to obtain that. This is not Half-Life: Alyx or Red Matter 2, but a game that seems to have been designed with kids in mind.

Input and interactions

The game uses the standard input scheme to let you move around and interact with elements. Probably the only exception is the teleporting that is performed with the A button of the Touch controllers and not with the thumbstick. It is interesting that the system offers both smooth locomotion and teleporting at the same time, without you having to meddle with an option window to select your favorite locomotion mechanic.

I have found some interactions within the game to be a bit clunky. First of all, the objects to assemble could be taken only through ray-casting, and I couldn’t simply grab them with my hands and move them. Manipulating them was so not very easy, and this could have been ok if the system assembled the tube by itself, but actually, it required me to put the two pieces in the right position and orientation to assemble them together. This was a bit uncomfortable. Also when moving with smooth locomotion, sometimes I found myself a bit stuck in some parts of the environment and I had to use teleporting to un-stuck myself. I wasn’t able to understand immediately that I could touch the bridges to activate them, so I spent a lot of time before getting it. Since all the interactions were made with ray-casting (sweeping books, assembling pieces, even teleporting), I expected I had to do something similar for the bridges, too. The callout from the cute figure wasn’t clear enough for me, so at a certain point I got frustrated because I didn’t know how to go from an isle to the other one… and being frustrated in a relaxing game is a bit of an oxymoron. I then discovered by chance that I had to actually touch the white things with my hands to unlock them… and from that moment on, everything got easier.

I so think there is a need for a bit of rework on the interactions side. Not much work, but just fixing 2-3 things in the right way should be enough to improve a lot the user experience.

Immersion

I can’t say I felt “present” in this world. I mean, it’s a toonish world, it is clearly fake, and it is not something you may really feel living in. But the game relaxed me, so it was able to put me in the right mental state: this means that the immersion was enough to reach that purpose.

Availability

Dream Catcher VR is currently available as a free demo on Steam, on the occasion of the Steam VR Fest. You can find it here. The Early Access version is expected for this year, while the full game should be released in May 2023.

Final impressions

I’ve found Dream Catcher VR to be a nice game. It is a quite particular genre, which is more meant to relax than to entertain, so it’s not the game I would play when I want to have fun. It’s the game I would like to play when I want to relax, and I’m seriously convinced that also some psychologists fans of VR may include this in some of their therapies. I also think this game could be great for kids: it is simple to be played, it is cute, and it is colored, so it would be great for small kids… even if they actually shouldn’t play with virtual reality.

I appreciated the well-done graphics and sounds, and the overall relaxing mood. I also liked the way they convey the lore of the game through the simple sentences thought by the guys that are dreaming because so you assemble the story as you assemble their dreams, visualized as 3D objects. I think there are some quirks here and there, especially on the UX side, but the game is just a demo and not even in early access, so I wouldn’t be too harsh about them. The studio has almost a year to fix these problems before the final release.

In general, I’m glad I’ve tried this demo, and I’m curious to see how the project will evolve. And if you try it too, don’t forget to let me know your impressions.

(Header image by CM Games)