Here's What You Should Play in Dreams While It's on PS Plus 1
Image: Push Square

Since Dreams launched in February 2020, it's come a long way. The game arrived with a whole host of weird and wonderful creations from the early access period, but it's been populated with a steady stream of brilliant stuff in the intervening years. We've made many recommendations on what's worth playing within Dreams in the past, but now that it's finally on PS Plus, newcomers might be searching for what to play and where to start. Let us help you out.

Aside from the incredible creation tools available to all players, Dreams is packed with fantastic content made by both the community and Media Molecule itself. Below, we're going to make some brand new recommendations on what to play while you're DreamSurfing, but we've also included links to all our previous features, each of which contains a handful of creations we think are worth checking out. If you want to know what to play in Dreams, this is a great place to start.

What Should I Play First in Dreams?

There are a few answers to this question. The truth is, you can play whatever you like first, but the game has several original games made by Media Molecule that serve as wonderful ways to kick off your time in Dreams.

Art's Dream

Art's Dream

This is the game Dreams launched with, developed by Media Molecule. It's a few hours long, and tells the story of Art, a down-on-his-luck musician who goes on an introspective journey to find his inspiration once again. It melds together various genres, themes, and art styles in order to show the breadth of experiences you can make using the tools — it's a point and click adventure, a 3D action platformer, and puzzle game all in one. All those disparate parts come together to tell a sweet story, with some great original music to boot.

Tren

Tren

Tren is the game that has launched right alongside Dreams' appearance on PS Plus, and from where we're sitting, it's one of the best things you can play in the game. It's an action puzzler that has you controlling a little toy train as it whizzes around wooden tracks. Most levels task you with getting through a stage as fast as you can, while others are more exploratory and puzzle-based. As well as the train, you'll also take control of helicopters, ships, and cranes as you progress. Beyond that are more challenging modes like survival and flip-based obstacle courses (yes, you can flip the train). Once you're done with all that, you can create your very own Tren levels with a comprehensive kit. Honestly, it's worth the price of entry to Dreams for Tren alone — and at the time of writing, it's free on PS Plus!

Ancient Dangers: A Bat's Tale

Ancient Dangers: A Bat's Tale

Ancient Dangers: A Bat's Tale is another short but sweet game made by the developer. Unlike Art's Dream, this is more singular in its focus; it's a top-down action game starring a pair of sibling orcs, who go on an adventure to find a cure for their grandmother's snoring. It's largely combat orientated, with simple but satisfying hack-and-slash fights. When you're not swiping at skeletons, though, there's also plenty of environmental puzzles to solve, collectibles to find, and lore to discover. Optionally playable in local co-op, this is a fun little jaunt — and it even has a few Trophies attached to it.

What Is Worth Playing in Dreams?

Well, obviously, all the above games are worth playing, but the vast majority of what's on offer is made by the community. The good news is that there's loads of valuable stuff to enjoy outside of Media Molecule's contributions. If you want some recommendations of recent creations we think are worth your time, check these out.

Cubille

Cubille

This is a cute puzzle game all about guiding marbles to their goals using wooden blocks. Each cube has some sort of channel or tunnel through which the marbles will flow, so you simply have to create a path from the start point to the exits. Well, we say simple; over the course of 16 levels, the difficulty ramps up as new block types are introduced and the levels grow in complexity. Once you've solved all those, there's a surprisingly robust recreation of Dreams' create mode, in which you can make your own levels. Kinda crazy!

Daily Observer

Daily Observer

To be perfectly honest, Daily Observer is still a bit of an enigma to us, but it's oddly fascinating. Playing as some sort of scientist out in deep space, you operate a tiny observation ship, warping to nondescript areas of the cosmos scanning for life. The hook here — and the clue's in the name — is that the game is designed to be played for a short period every day. So, once you carry out your duties — growing plants, uncovering nightmarish blob creatures, you know the drill — you turn in for the night and can't play the game again until tomorrow. It's a real mystery, and one that's designed for players to unpick slowly over real time. Very clever idea.

Hook Shot

Hook Shot

If you're into first-person parkour, puzzlers, or both, you'll definitely enjoy Hook Shot. Featuring Mirror's Edge-like traversal, you quickly also gain the ability to latch onto grapple points and swing across stages like a robo-Spider-Man. There's more than a hint of Portal about the design here, too — featureless test chambers, block and switch puzzles, and so on. It feels good to play and is pretty challenging, too.

Raceline Turbo

Raceline Turbo

There are lots of neat little racing games in Dreams, but we stumbled upon this one lately, and it's ones of the best we've played. Raceline Turbo is a top-down time attack game that puts us in mind of MotorStorm RC or, more recently, Art of Rally. The handling does take some getting used to; you really need to balance acceleration and braking properly to get around corners properly, and no mini-map means committing the tracks to memory. However, once it clicks, it feels really good. It's tough, but that only makes pulling off a slick lap all the sweeter.

Uranium Fishing

Uranium Fishing

We added this one in because the simplicity of it made us laugh. You're a miner on some unknown planet, you have a giant metal ball on the end of a fishing rod, and you need to swing it around to collect chunks of uranium and return them to your ship. Almost immediately, a strange creature is introduced that's after the uranium too, adding a bit of drama as you fight over the scraps. It puts us in mind of the sort-of mini games people were making at the very start of Dreams, which we mean as a compliment. A simple idea, well executed.

More Recommendations

Dreams

Now, the above are just a few great creations we'd recommend you check out in Dreams, but there are countless more. In fact, we've spent a good amount of energy highlighting some of our favourite things in the game over the years. Below, you'll find links to several other Dreams round-up features, all of which contain a handful of games, sculpts, or other bits and pieces we think are worth your time. If you've blazed through all the stuff we've outlined above, hit these up for plenty more. The most recent recommendations are at the top of the list.

All Hallows' Dreams: The Land of Lost Dreams

If these still aren't enough recommendations for you, we have more suggestions. Going back to Media Molecule, the studio spent the last several years adding annual in-game events. The two major ones were DreamsCom and All Hallows' Dreams — the former a riff on E3 complete with digital showfloors filled with community-made booths showing off their creations, and the latter a Halloween-themed playground featuring player-carved pumpkins and spooky mini-levels. These were all wonderful attractions, and the best part is that they never went away. You can still play them, and they're still just as good. We covered these as well — here are our thoughts.

Other Resources

We've given you lots to be getting on with here, but Dreams is so ripe with interesting things to see and do that we can't stop there. Fortunately, there are other useful resources dedicated to highlighting the best the game has to offer, so let's go through some of those below.

Push Square Picks

Push Square Picks
Image: Push Square

Push Square Picks is an in-game collection of stuff we think is worth your time. If you find yourself lost as you're browsing through Dreams, search for Push Square Picks to find three collections with dozens of recommendations. The most recent of these was actually put together by Media Molecule itself! Here are links to each of the individual collections:

indreams.me

indreams.me

This is the official companion website to Dreams, and it's fantastic. All the links on our recommendations will take you to indreams.me, where it provides more details on each creation. This includes a description from the creator, screenshots, statistics, tags, comments, and more.

All of that is great, but the best part of the site is that it integrates with the game seamlessly. Provided you're signed into PSN on your browser, you can use this website to launch Dreams creations in the game, add them to your Play Later list, give them a thumbs up, leave comments, and more. If you discover something on indreams.me you want to try in the game, it's much easier to use this functionality than it is to manually search for it a second time in Dreams.

The Impsider

The Impsider

The Impsider is actually a sub-section of indreams.me, but guess what? It's dedicated to shining a spotlight on the very best creations and creators in Dreams. This is a digital magazine of sorts, produced by Media Molecule, that regularly publishes lists of recommendations from the studio's dedicated curation team.

There are over 100 Weekly Roundup features that each pick out a handful of Dreams creations, be they games, sculptures, animations, whatever. More recently, The Impsider has been putting out 7 of the Best... lists that each focus on a theme or genre. If you're interested in the best horror games in Dreams, for example, you're covered.

The Game Itself

DreamSurfing
Image: Push Square

Forgive us for stating the obvious, but it's true: Dreams does a phenomenal job of surfacing all the best community creations. When you enter the game's DreamSurfing option — which is where you access everything shared by other players — there's a huge array of playlists and recommendations, all curated by Media Molecule.

At the very top are featured games or collections, and below you'll find categories like Trending Now, Recommended for You, What We're Playing, and much more. The Daily DreamSurf playlist is updated daily, of course, and a fun thing to check each time you boot up the game. Elsewhere, these lists can get pretty specific; at the time of writing, some playlists we see are Daunting Dinosaurs and Bring a Friend. If you're in the mood for prehistoric reptiles or local co-op experiences, you're in luck.

As well as all these playlists, you'll find collections that provide a broader view. Mm Picks includes the developer's favourite creations all in one place; Forever Popular shows you the all-time most-played stuff; and Dreams by Genre categorises creations even further with lists like Platformers, Horror, Sports & Racing, and so on. In short, you can trust the game itself to recommend creations to you.

That about does it for our Dreams recommendations. To reiterate, Dreams will be available on PS Plus Essential between 1st August and 5th September 2023, so make sure to add it to your library within that timeframe. There's a wealth of good stuff to find, as we hope we've made clear, but obviously we can't highlight everything. What are some of your favourite things in Dreams? We'd highly encourage more recommendations in the comments section below.