Dreamcore | Review

Győző "FairyEmpire" BakiJanuary 28, 2025Last Updated: January 28, 2025

0 7 minutes read

Fan of liminal spaces, such as the Internet phenomenon “the backrooms”? You’re in luck, because that’s exactly where this first person psychological walking simulator takes you. We tested Dreamcore on Xbox Series X, already one of the most surprising games of the year!

Back into the backrooms

If you’re not familiar with the concept of liminal spaces, they usually refer to empty places with very few recognizeable elements to help you navigate through, such as an empty and barely decorated hotel hallway, or a maze of identical-looking walls. The most famous of the bunch are the backrooms, a fictional “out of bounds” place in our reality where you get to walk eternally in these surreal interconnected empty corridors. Over on Steam, on PC, there’s several dozens of games that capitalized on this trend, with many even on Xbox – such as The Backrooms Online or Backrooms: Partygoers.

Let’s be crass, though – the vast majority of these games are absolutely low effort games. Many of them are just boring walking simulators, some with jumpscares, that visually recreate the well known phenomenon but that add very little to make it a worthwile journey. The few that add some other gameplay elements, on the contrary, often defeat the point of the liminal space concept to begin with: it’s supposed to be surreal, ethereal, lonely, dream-like. It’s not supposed to be fast-paced or logically structured at all. Dreamcore, however, understands the task at hand perfectly.

Surreal realism

There are currently two stages available, but whichever you choose, one thing is immediately clear – this game’s visuals are absolutely top-notch for the experience it should be. A first person bodycam view is used, featuring the slight fish eye effect that’s expected from such an angle, with a perfectly recreated VHS filter on top. This grainy look makes the world look less detailed, in a sense, but it tricks your brain into thinking it looks more real than it really does – as we are conditioned to seeing 80’s/90’s tape footage and assume the extra detail ourselves.

Underneath these filters, runs the mighty powerful, if often poorly optimized Unreal Engine 5, which Dreamcore uses absolutely perfectly. Virtually every asset in the game looks high enough quality to fool us into photorealism with the aforementioned VHS look, and with the camera bobbing believeably on the bodycam, it really feels like we’ve just found a cursed videotape from another dimension. Light sources, reflections and shadows are, aside from a few occasional spots, are perfect, as things reflect onto the water, the walls, etc. exactly as our brain would expect them to. The player’s walk is slow, though a slightly faster run option exists, but the movement generally feels believeable. All these tricks work like a charm, and Dreamcore may be the “realest” looking videogame on console right now, barring FMV-based titles, as these visual choices manage to shake off the videogame-y look of even high-budget AAA titles by Naughty Dog or Rockstar Games.

Let’s take a swim

Let’s start by exploring the first stage, Dreampools – and boy, what a journey this is. Our first person view sees the camera roll down a giant plastic slide, which our protagonist then picks up. One interesting aspect of the whole Dreamcore experience, is that at no point we see a single fraction of the protagonist’s body, face, hands or anything. There is nobody else here, either. Nothing actually happens. Nothing can actually be interacted with, barring doors and a grand total of like 1 item per stage. Past the opening seconds of our protagonist moving without the camera, there’s not a single cutscene. No dialogue. No inner monologue. Nothing. Dreamcore is as lonely as it gets, like in some of our most surreal dreams.

Dreampools has the player navigate through what is seemingly a never-ending maze of shallow pools, corridors connecting them, colourful giant slides and occasional benches and plants rendering such a surreal place just a lit bit more humane. Bright lights, once again like in a dream, can be found in most rooms, but at no point the player ever sees what’s outside of this strange building. There’s stairs going up and down alike, as this maze extends both horizontally and vertically, but the level design is interconnected in such a way that even when it feels like we’re running in circles, we do end up making progress. The goal, in this case, is to find a torch, which in turn allows us to enter the underground area, one that is too dark to access without.

Backpools

This stage is the quintessential surreal experience that Dreamcore is all about. The “faux photorealistic” look, mixed with unlikely architecture choices, really sell the idea that we’re exploring a dream world. Rooms and corridors interconnect in a way that makes little sense, yet the progression feels constant – almost like the game is pulling The Stanley Parable-esque trick of moving corridors while we aren’t looking. While every room opens to several other directions, making it easy to get lost, this smart design ensures we rarely truly lose our way. Indeed, a few recognizeable landmarks, some of which are entirely optional to find, help the player at least get a clue on their general direction at least. There’s a few hand-drawn clues here and there, and rooms can have different colours and lights, but the repetition is part of the game’s intentions.

Once I reentered an “iconic” location, I immediately remembered where I first reached that area and what direction I chose – so I just took a different path and immediately found myself making progression. The game has a few invisible checkpoints along the way, which help in case you quit the game, which is perhaps the only real “hint” you get about whether you’re making progress or not – as you can see the small, save icon in the bottom of your screen. The atmosphere is further heightened by the faint static sound of nothingness, in which we can hear our echoed footsteps loud and clear, and nothing else really. With all that said, this ethereal journey ended after about an hour of walking, as I’ve eventually found the way out of this bizarre journey – one I’ve absolutely adored for its atmosphere, despite the fact that in terms of gameplay it doesn’t even attempt to do anything per se.

Houses

After the credits rolled (they do at the end of every stage), I immediately hopped over to the second currently available stage: Eternal Suburbia, a level I’ve also found to be visually outstanding, but one where the level design left me more frustrated than anything. The locale changes, but the philosophy does not – what looks like a nuclear test facility with identical white wooden houses, spread across hills, with identical fences separating each area. The player has to essentially move through these interconnected gardens, entering house after house, which in turn serves as the connecting point between one lawn and another. The homes, themself, often feature stairs, several hallways and different exit points, with then the player finding themselves out again, looking at these virtually identical gardens and houses no matter where they look.

The sky is blue and full of fluffy clouds, though there’s a fast day/night cycle that cycles through, making us see the moon or the sun rising – once again, with perfectly realized lights and shadows that add to the game’s surreal realism. Whereas the previous level basically didn’t even have doors, this one has them in abundance, as every house entered and left has us cross one. Once again, that’s more or less where the interactivity ends, though we do end up finding a key item, as we navigate through this maze of gardens and houses. This time, there’s less of a hint as to what to do, but there’s a visual reference that helps getting the general idea of what exactly we’re trying to reach here.

Out of bounds and lost

During the day, a distorted uplifting music blasts through the speakers that are spread around the various gardens, indicating it’s a bright sunny day. Indeed, there’s no rain or any different weather in sight – repetition is key, even when it comes to the skies. Overall, Eternal Suburbia took me a little bit longer than Dreampools, not only because the stage is much more layered than it would initially seem, but because the level design here is just not as effective. You see, these fenced gardens with identical houses are just… frustrating, to navigate through. Even when you have a general idea of what direction you want to go, there’s high chances that the house or garden you’re in doesn’t actually go that way, so you’ll be walking towards a direction you don’t want to go in. And while gardens have different shapes, with the insides of houses also changing a little, it’s much harder to realize we are back in already seen places, compared to the amazing Dreampools stage.

And then this level just keeps going on and on. At multiple points, I assumed I’ve reasonably found the exit or something close to it, but then the level just unleashed yet another maze of houses at me. While visually and conceptually they do change, the level design’s shortcomings often stay, with later the interiors of homes becoming way too convoluted and repetitive to be all that enjoyable. Yep, you’ll even encounter an area that visually calls back to “the backrooms”, so this isn’t just generic liminal spaces. Eternal Suburbia is still a surreal and memorable experience, but its level design and progression are a notable step back from Dreampools.

Future stages and our present

These two stages only took me about 2 and a half hours to complete, and I vastly enjoyed most of that time – even despite some frustration in the second level. As the stage selection screen shows, there’s 3 more stages coming in future updates – one this Summer, one later in Winter, and one sometime in 2026. It’s not an early access title, yet 60% of the planned stages are currently not in the game. I still find the value proposition more than adeguate, as you’ll be looking at spending about 9 dollars, for what is already a few hours of liminal space exploration.

With the second stage being not as great as the first, a question keeps banging in my head: will the upcoming 3 levels be brilliantly made like Dreampools, or will they be somewhat frustrating like Eternal Suburbia? The answer to this question may decide whether Dreamcore will end up being one of the most incredible videogames of 2025 or just a pretty good one. As it stands, I already feel like wholeheartedly recommend the title to anyone who doesn’t mind slow, seemingly meaningless exploration. Repetition, navigation woes, some frustration does kick in. But much of it is by design, and Dreamcore nails most of its goals. It’s an audiovisually captivating journey through liminal spaces, a dream-like experience that masters the concept like few other videogames before. Personally, I absolutely can not wait to play the upcoming levels, because Dreamcore is already an amazing and unique ride. This is one dream I won’t immediately forget.