Dreaming Sarah

Dreaming Sarah is a 2D puzzle-platformer where you control a young girl named Sarah who is in a coma. She explores a surreal and fantastical dream world, visiting bizarre locations like a room full of eyes, a haunted mansion, and an imaginary desert. The gameplay involves searching for various items and using them, or giving them to the right characters, to unlock new areas and progress, similar to classic games in the Dizzy series.

Dreaming Sarah: A Journey Through a Fractured Subconscious

Prologue: The Girl in the Coma

In the vast, often derivative landscape of indie gaming, a title that explicitly positions itself in the lineage of a cult classic is either an act of profound hubris or one of sincere homage. Dreaming Sarah, the inaugural 2013 release from Brazilian developer Asteristic Game Studio, boldly plants its flag in the soil tilled by Yume Nikki, inviting players into the comatose mind of its titular heroine. This is not a game of high-octane action or complex mechanics; it is a slow, deliberate, and often perplexing pilgrimage through a psyche fractured by trauma. Over a decade since its initial release on Windows, followed by a slow migration to nearly every modern platform, Dreaming Sarah remains a polarizing artifact—a game praised for its atmospheric commitment and criticized for its mechanical and narrative shortcomings. This review will delve into the intricate layers of Sarah’s dreamscape, examining its artistic vision, its gameplay foundations, its thematic ambitions, and its ultimate legacy within the pantheon of surreal exploration games.

Section I: The Premise and World – A Surrealist’s Sketchbook

The narrative setup of Dreaming Sarah is deceptively simple, almost to a fault. As the official description states, the player controls Sarah, “a girl who is in a coma. She visits an imaginary land.” This is the entire narrative bedrock upon which the game is built. The player’s objective is to explore this land, collect items, and interact with its bizarre inhabitants to, presumably, help Sarah awaken. The game’s marketing and Steam description explicitly invoke Yume Nikki, the seminal 2004 freeware game by Kikiyama, which established the template for the “dream exploration” genre: a silent protagonist, a non-linear world, surreal and often unsettling imagery, and a focus on atmosphere over explicit narrative.

However, Dreaming Sarah immediately differentiates itself by providing a concrete, real-world cause for the dream state: a car accident. As noted by the critic from PrincessPengy, this is a fundamental departure from its inspiration. “When you then outright state in the next paragraph of your video game’s steam description that the main character is trapped in a coma, your arrow lands in the bushes… one of dreaming sarah’s greatest handicaps is the fact that it tries to develop a surreal and introspective exploratory experience, but also hinges all of its themes and storytelling around a specific, predictable narrative, thus reducing all of those surreal elements into pointless set dressing.”

This tension is at the heart of the Dreaming Sarah experience. The game presents a world that includes a forest, a desert, a volcano, and a haunted mansion—environments that, while classic, are far more conventional than the abstract, psychological spaces of Yume Nikki. There are moments of genuine surrealism, such as a room filled with disembodied eyes or a landscape of giant teeth, but as PrincessPengy astutely observes, these often serve little purpose beyond a fleeting visual shock. “You wanna know what you do in each of those two areas? respectively: give the red blob an item and then immediately leave, and pick up a hat and then immediately leave.”

The world, therefore, feels like a collection of ideas rather than a cohesive whole. It’s a surrealist’s sketchbook where compelling concepts are introduced but rarely developed. A pink moon hosts a seedy bar; a grandfather clock acts as a portal; a well leads to magma-filled caverns. The Game Hoard review captures this sentiment perfectly, stating the game “really feels like a hard game to properly define.” It possesses unsettling imagery but “nothing that pushes things into actual horror,” offset by “cute art, strange characters, and some silly fun.” The world is diverse and often visually interesting, but it lacks the deep, unsettling symbolic cohesion that defines its primary influence.

Section II: Gameplay Mechanics – The Ghost of Dizzy and the Burden of Backtracking

From a gameplay perspective, Dreaming Sarah is a 2D platformer with puzzle and adventure elements, a structure MobyGames accurately compares to the classic Dizzy series. The core loop involves navigating side-scrolling environments, collecting items, and using them to solve environmental puzzles or trade with the world’s eccentric NPCs. An umbrella allows for gliding across gaps, a necklace transforms Sarah into a fish for underwater exploration, and a compass is intended to point toward points of interest.

This framework, while sound in theory, is where the game receives its most consistent criticism. The platforming itself is rudimentary. Sarah’s movement is slow and her jump is weighty and limited. As TheXboxHub review notes, “Sarah’s default jump is short and weighty, which can make some platforms harder to reach. Similarly, her walking speed does leave something to be desired.” This is not a precision platformer, and the level design rarely demands it, but the controls can feel unresponsive in tighter situations. Furthermore, VGamingNews points out significant technical issues: “Some of the items you collect either have no use (like a paint bucket that changes Sarah’s colour palette), or simply don’t work. Early on you find a compass that’s supposed to ‘point to interesting things’ but I found that it only appeared after selecting it from the item wheel about one percent of the time.”

The most significant point of contention, echoed across nearly every review, is the game’s approach to progression and the resulting backtracking. The puzzle solutions often operate on a form of “dream logic” that can be obtuse. Indie Hive provides a quintessential example: “while exploring a mouth… I encountered a bloody globule-like creature blocking my path; I removed said creature by killing it with some sour orange juice.” This obscurity, combined with a lack of clear direction, frequently leaves the player wandering the same screens repeatedly, searching for a new path or item that may have appeared without clear indication.

The Game Hoard elaborates on this exhaustively: “Far too often Dreaming Sarah will leave you with no obvious direction to go in, requiring you to scour the available areas for something new that sprouted up without any real connection to whatever triggered its appearance… The constant walking back and forth doesn’t really add much either… Retreading the same ground repeatedly just in case the most recent random change happens to be there is not engaging.” This design choice, intended to mimic the non-sequitur nature of dreams, often translates to frustration in practice, “wear[ing] out its welcome by having you traverse its entirety a bit too much.”

Section III: Aesthetic and Audio – The Unquestionable Triumph

If there is one aspect of Dreaming Sarah that achieves near-universal acclaim, it is its presentation. The pixel art, while simple, is effective and often beautiful. The color palette is vibrant and dreamlike, with each biome possessing a distinct visual identity. Critics from Pure Nintendo and TheXboxHub praised the visuals, with the latter stating that “the colours absolutely pop, oftentimes leaving a stunning image,” running at a smooth “4K 60fps” on modern consoles.

The true masterpiece of the presentation, however, is the soundtrack by Anthony Septim. It is consistently highlighted as a standout feature, a key element that elevates the entire experience. Game Rant’s review from 2015 describes it as “dreamy, ambient, 16-bit trip-hop,” which “creates a perfect blend of mysterious atmosphere, nostalgia, and a well-crafted modern edge.” TheXboxHub calls the tracks “atmospheric, moody and simply all around excellent,” even pointing readers toward the free download on Steam. The music does the heavy lifting in establishing the game’s ethereal, melancholic, and occasionally tense atmosphere. It is the glue that holds the disparate visual elements together and provides emotional weight to Sarah’s journey, making the often-tedious exploration a more sonically rewarding experience.

Section IV: Narrative and Thematic Depth – The Promise Unfulfilled

Dreaming Sarah attempts to tell a story, but it does so with a frustrating vagueness that sits uneasily with its concrete premise. The game provides glimpses of the real-world trauma—a scene of an unconscious Sarah next to a car with a broken windshield, a bullet item hinting at a darker cause—but it refuses to engage with these elements in a meaningful way. As PrincessPengy criticizes, “the game literally shows you a scene of an unconscious sarah slumped outside of a car with a broken windshield, and presents you with a bullet item just in case there was any ambiguity as to what happened here… the game ends with all of the items you’ve collected dramatically swirling around sarah as though they had any narrative meaning at all and her waking up in a hospital bed.”

The NPCs you meet are numerous but shallow. They offer quirky one-liners or simple fetch quests but rarely contribute to a deeper understanding of Sarah’s psyche. The Game Hoard notes that “Sarah remain[s] silent and most dialog from other characters in the game focused on their little bubble in this dream world.” The potential for psychological exploration is immense—themes of trauma, fear, and the desire to wake up are all present—but the game seems content to let its symbolism remain surface-level. It builds an “atmosphere of unease,” as The Game Hoard states, but “leaves a bit too much vague perhaps to try and encourage discussion, but there’s not really enough direction to continue the conversation beyond the few more obvious symbols in the game.”

This lack of commitment is the game’s central narrative failing. It wants the free-form, interpretive depth of Yume Nikki while also providing a straightforward, emotionally resonant story of recovery from a coma. In trying to serve both masters, it fully satisfies neither.

Section V: The Legacy and the Series – From Dreaming to Wishing to Awakening

Dreaming Sarah cannot be fully evaluated in isolation; it is the first chapter in a triptych that includes Wishing Sarah (2020) and the upcoming Awakening Sarah. The existence of these sequels is a testament to the foundational ideas that resonated with a small but dedicated audience. Wishing Sarah, with its deliberate Game Boy aesthetic and a narrative that complicates the ending of the first game (suggesting Sarah’s awakening may have been another layer of the dream), was seen by critics like PrincessPengy as an improvement, introducing “a complicating element to the otherwise dreadfully boring story of the first game.”

The very fact that Asteristic Game Studio continued to build upon this world suggests a belief in the core concept that perhaps outstrips the execution of this initial entry. The series represents a developer honing their craft and their vision. Dreaming Sarah is the raw, unpolished prototype—the proof of concept, as GamingTrend’s review suggests—that laid the groundwork for more refined explorations. Its legacy is that of a flawed but earnest pioneer in a niche subgenre, a game that introduced a character and a style that would be revisited and recontextualized.

Section VI: Critical and Player Consensus – A House Divided

The critical reception for Dreaming Sarah is a study in measured ambivalence. On MobyGames, it holds a 64% average based on two critic reviews. Game Rant awarded it a 70% (3.5/5), praising its nostalgia, music, and art, while The Game Hoard gave it a 57% (4/7), critiquing its vague progression and excessive backtracking. This split is reflected elsewhere: Pure Nintendo awarded a strong 8/10, calling its world “fun to explore,” while VGamingNews delivered a harsh 3/10, finding it a “nonsensical wander.” The Family Friendly Gaming review scored it a 67%, acknowledging its quirks and frustrations. Player scores, though limited, average a 3.3 out of 5, indicating a generally positive, if not ecstatic, personal response.

The consensus is clear: the game’s atmosphere, art, and music are its undeniable strengths, capable of creating a memorable, short-lived experience for the right player. Its weaknesses are equally clear: obtuse puzzles, excessive and aimless backtracking, underdeveloped narrative themes, and occasionally clunky mechanics. It is an “OKAY” game, as The Game Hoard concluded, a “short and sweet” experience that “really didn’t offer anything new,” as Indie Hive summarized.

Epilogue: The Value of a Dream

In the final analysis, Dreaming Sarah is a difficult game to wholeheartedly recommend, yet an easy one to intellectually defend. It is a title that wears its influences proudly, perhaps too proudly, failing to fully synthesize them into a unique and cohesive vision. Its gameplay loop is often tedious, its narrative potential squandered by a lack of focus, and its mechanical execution occasionally flawed.

And yet.

For a certain type of player—the patient explorer, the connoisseur of indie oddities, the fan of atmospheric soundtracks and pixel art—Dreaming Sarah offers a two-to-three-hour journey that is, at its best moments, genuinely captivating. It is a time capsule of a specific era of indie development, a game built on passion and a clear, if imperfectly realized, artistic goal. It is not the nightmare it could have been, nor is it the revelatory dream it aspired to be. Like most dreams we experience, as The Game Hoard so eloquently put it, “it will come and go without leaving too much of an impression. It’s a brief trip through strangeness that is interesting to see, but that’s about it.” For its low price point and its status as the opening act to a more ambitious series, Dreaming Sarah remains a curious, flawed, and ultimately poignant footnote in the history of dream-logic games.