Dreaming Sarah

Drew has pledged to slowly but slowly churn his way through his sizeable stack of Nintendo Switch games for his ‘Beat the Backlog’ feature. Check out his main article to see what games he’s completed already!

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Dreaming Sarah, from Spanish indies, Asteristic Games Studio, is a game I have no recollection of adding to my backlog. Looking back over my purchases, I noticed that I bought it on Boxing Day in 2022, which does make some sense – I often get eShop vouchers for Christmas, and I do have a tendency to grab a couple of indie titles that are super cheap during the festive sales. I always hope to find a little hidden gem as a late Christmas gift to myself, but so far I’ve only managed to uncover a few lumps of Krampus’ coal…

Firing up the game, you awaken as the titular Sarah, who’s seemingly taken a nap in the middle of a forest. You’re not offered any narrative background as to how you got there, what’s going on, or what you’re supposed to do, so I just started wandering around to see what was what. It quickly became apparent that ‘wandering around’ is a pretty solid synopsis of the entire game, as there’s very little structure to much of anything, and you’re left entirely to your own devices. I gleaned from the title of the game that Sarah is sleeping, and therefore surmised that everything you see and experience takes place in her dreams, but you’d have no reason to think that if you skipped the title screen, as it’s never alluded anywhere else in the game.

To portray Sarah’s dream state, Asteristic Games have you travel through all manner of weird and wonderful environments, using portals to get between them. From the starting forest you’ll take an elevator to a strange void dimension, and from there you can catch a rocketship to a tiny yellow moon that you can run all the way around Super Mario Galaxy style. There’s also a grandfather clock portal that takes you to a haunted house, a mirror that leads you to a desert island and a well that leads to you magma filled cavern of some kind. I understand the idea is to be wacky and surreal, but there’s actually so little rhyme or reason about how these environments interact with one another that things just feel thrown together.

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At a Glance

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Portrayed in some basic pixel art, the game features a number of off the wall characters, though none of them really have any meaningful impact on your experience. Nobody sticks around beyond a few lines of text and a simple fetch quest of some kind, where they ask Sarah to find an item they’ve misplaced or require for some odd, arbitrary reason. Finding these items and returning them to the right characters makes up almost all of the gameplay in Dreaming Sarah, as the platforming never grows beyond basic navigation either.

Some of the items you collect can be used to help Sarah get around, like an umbrella that helps you glide when you jump or a necklace that turns you into a fish and lets you swim underwater. Sadly, 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, which is just frustrating. Also frustrating were the four or five ‘soft locks’ that required me to turn the game off and on again – for a title that can be finished in two hours (with room to spare), this is unforgivable.

Perhaps the only saving grace is that the whole of Dreaming Sarah is incredibly laid back and it’s not going to break the bank. Dying will cause you to respawn immediately where you entered the area, and there’s no way to botch any of the puzzles, allowing you to meander through the different environments at your own pace until you stumble upon what you need to progress. This is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, is very low stakes and will only cost you a couple of quid if you feel like it’s up your street. 

Dreaming Sarah is a rather nonsensical wander through a string of surreal environments and sadly never coalesces into much more than a hodgepodge collection of ideas. It’s a carefree and low stakes affair which may appeal to some, but with almost no story to speak of, and driven by only the tiniest sliver of gameplay, I found my attention span waning long before the two-hour runtime was up.

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