In Q-Games’ latest for PlayStation VR2, guns are no longer weapons of war but tools for imagination and healing.

If there’s one thing the Japan-based studio has specialized in over the years, it’s in creating artistically meaningful games from seemingly simple ideas, particularly in their PixelJunk series. In PixelJunk Eden, you jump from plant to plant while exploring organic worlds, making music and life in a hypnotic and calming manner that mirrors nature and life. It's directed by musician and game director Baiyon, who is also leading development on Dreams of Another, a visually ambitious story of life and death that only becomes more impressive when thrust into the realm of VR.

As confirmed in our recent Q&A, the concept behind Dreams of Another is to explore “human contradictions, our sense of inadequacy, dreams and regrets, and what freedom means” within the contradictory nature of the gun and its difficult virtual and real-world connotations transformed into a tool for creation and understanding. Thus, you follow the Man in Pajamas and the Wandering Soldier in a dreamlike world, trying to understand forgotten memories that warp and blend under its impressive spottily rendered imaginary universe. What do you remember or forget, and how do those memories shape us? That’s the heart of this title.

With this in mind, the game’s core revolves around stepping through an ever-evolving cloud-like world that could warp into physical objects when shot with a gun. Nothing feels truly real when a mass of bubbles transforms into a home or a weary soldier or the carcass of a dead mole. The point is that each bullet takes you one step closer to understanding your own memories and self by witnessing these stories in this dream world. Which makes it a perfect title for VR.

If Dreams of Another is striking from trailers and visuals alone, the game only elevates itself when placed into an immersive medium such as this. In a flatscreen perspective, the idea is you would watch this story and world unfold and evolve from a third-person perspective, while the first-person VR-only perspective puts you directly into this experience. Rather than aiming a gun with a controller like any other shooter, you hold the PS VR2 Sense controllers like a gun to fire into the distance, moving closer to inspect every detail directly from your own eyes.

In our short demo, taken from the game’s early moments, I find myself in the equivalent of a town square and left to my devices. Firing my gun forwards created a path into this voxel-like world to at least understand where I'm supposed to be. A fountain comes into view, then a weary soldier. Homes and cafes spring to life, and I'll speak to the weary faces I see. Shooting a table that came into existence before me creates a nostalgic town center that just dithers on the edge of realization.

After shooting objects and bringing them into existence from the balls of light around you, they appear like real physical objects that you can traverse. You bring this world to life, but it is still merely an imagined existence. After eventually finding and shooting a manhole, I hear a voice recalling seeing a creature spring from inside. You shoot footsteps and the manhole cover itself as it rolls around and disperses the light energy from the surrounding buildings to try and discover the truth, only to find the aforementioned mole. Its family is inside the hole and, presumably seeking food, it comes out only to be killed.

This, and the older man’s reaction we also see in this brief sequence, give us a window into the storytelling ideas we can expect in the final release. By shooting and evolving this space, we witness these non-linear stories unfold across new environments blending real and imaginary space. It's difficult to describe what makes Dreams of Another so intriguing. It’s a reflection on life, and the tough decisions and experiences that define it, made abstract in a world of light balls and bullets that’s surprisingly beautiful, not violent.

There’s so much more to explore in the final game than our brief 15-minute demo could allow. But there is a genuine sense that the game is probing deep into my sense of self and projecting it into a malleable world that looks nothing like I’ve seen in games before, yet somehow intensely familiar. Have you ever closed your eyes and seen rays of light flicking through the underside of your eyelids like a tunnel into an endless universe? It feels like that, transformed into a more embellished, interactive experience.

Dreams of Another has the chance to be something special, with VR arguably the most immersive way to experience it. At least, to a point. Though I found myself enamored by the game, the ideas showcased in trailers clicking with me at last after initial confusion over the game’s overall aims, there are limits preventing me from fully immersing myself in its world. This mainly comes in its narrative components, inconsistent in the ways it wishes to relay itself to the player.

Even veterans in the space have relayed their challenges in how best to tell a story or use cutscenes in a VR space where you can’t control what direction a player will witness these events unfold. Do you prioritize immersion and hope players see the story unfold the way you intend it, or do you lock them in place, potentially ruining their immersion by wrenching control from the player? Dreams of Another unfortunately takes the worst option by refusing to commit to either of these options.

The stated intent by Baiyon in our prior Q&A is to use the VR-only first-person viewpoint to make the story more immersive. Upon meeting the soldier on the steps of the fountain, they speak directly to me from my own perspective, prioritizing keeping me in the universe as they share their weariness and despair. As I approach the manhole, however, we are wrenched away into a black void for a flatscreen, pre-rendered cutscene. As the mole speaks its dying words, some aspects of this moment are told from a first-person perspective, while others once again throw me into the black void to watch a scripted scene from a virtual screen.

I confirmed with Q-Games that this is not merely the result of an in-development build where certain scenes have yet to be adapted for VR. These choices are made on a scene-by-scene basis as to how best to relay their story, with the decision on how to view these story segments being made from there. While I can respect this choice, I personally find it jarring in ways that feel distracting, rather than enhancing the emotional arc of the boy. If anything, the fact this world is so malleable and beyond reality made this more jarring than if the game aimed for a more conventional or photorealistic style. In a world so unreal and unlike anything I’ve seen before, constructed by my own hands, it feels restricting to be wrestled away like this.

It's my only negative experience from a demo that felt nothing like anything I’ve experienced before. The game won an award at BitSummit 2025, where it was showcased for the first time in VR, and this is thoroughly deserved. While we’ll have to see whether the experience can hold across a full multi-hour experience, the building blocks of something unique are here and improved by VR.

At least, when we remain in that immersive world the team has crafted for us.

Dreams of Another reaches PlayStation VR2 on October 10.