Strange Gaming Diaries: Dreaming Sarah (& Wishing Sarah), by Asteristic Game Studio

when you put "inspired by the horror game yume nikki" as the first seven words in your video game's steam description, you're notching an arrow in the hopes of hitting the bullseye of a particular demographic of people. this is a statement that communicates a desire to stand in a venerable lineage of all sorts of contemplative and variously inscrutable pieces of interactive art, and while I'm typically not one to get too comparative with a game and its influences, dreaming sarah is a game that clearly wants to be like yume nikki and its brood. it wants to take the "girl the player initially knows nothing about has her subconscious explored through the navigation of various surreal dreamscapes" concept and make something of itself.

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.

I know I'm being a little bit mean here, but I'm not just quipping to sound smart with this—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 thrown in so the game can keep up its yume nikki street cred. as a matter of fact, if you've seen either of the game's two store pages or its trailers, you've probably seen that one area with the teeth and the other one with the spooky eyes (as pictured at the top of this page), right? 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.

instead, the game spends most of its time in mundane, largely uninteresting spaces. you start in a Forest Level. there is a Desert Level, as well as a Volcano Level and a Spooky Mansion Level. no twists or anything I'd even charitably call "surreal" are anywhere to be found in most of the game's environments, and even the weirder stuff like the seedy bar on a pink moon or some of the more abstract geometric areas fail to coalesce into anything meaningful or evoke any kind of specificity in its themes. at most, I'd say that the game has a pattern of references to drugs, but the game about being in a coma having drugs in it isn't exactly what I'd call groundbreaking storytelling!

it's all just so bland and obvious. 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. there are npc characters you can actually talk to, but almost none of them have anything interesting or meaningful to say. 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 thing about yume nikki is that weird abstract nonsense is firmly its norm, such that when you get to the parts of the game that look like a sensible rpg map, it's almost its own kind of disquieting shock. and, crucially, there are thematic and symbolic patterns that can be charted throughout the game; spaces in yume nikki are vast and mostly empty, and most of its inhabitants are characterized by some combination of anatomical distortion and garishly colorful palettes. mundane objects and concepts are interspersed with elements not found anywhere in reality—giant cubes with frowny faces in the desert, a traincar with vaguely humanoid creatures in the seats, a road cutting through the forest with giant colorful beings that kinda look like uteruses.

dreaming sarah, by contrast, is mostly just a bunch of sensible and ordinary stuff in places where it shouldn't be, full of shallow attempts at placing surreal elements into an otherwise uninspiring game by making the door to a different world be a grandfather clock wedged into the ground when none of the two worlds have anything to do with grandfather clocks and no other grandfather clocks or images related thereto show up anywhere else.

but surprise, this entry is a double feature, because dreaming sarah also has a little sequel called wishing sarah! in a complete change of pace, wishing sarah is actually designed in the style of a game boy game, and in a decision I find absolutely delightful, the download for wishing sarah even comes with a rom version of the game you can put onto a cartridge and play on an actual game boy. that's just neat!

wishing sarah also introduces a complicating element to the otherwise dreadfully boring story of the first game: even after seemingly waking up from that coma and finding herself in a hospital bed, sarah's surroundings quickly prove themselves to still be fucked up and dreamlike, with no explanation to be seen!

I'm of mixed feelings about this—it reinvigorates the concept and suggests that there's more going on than just the obvious trail of breadcrumbs provided by the first game, but it doesn't actually have any compelling evidence towards anything else happening. for all we know, sarah could just still be in a coma, with the first coma having been a coma inside of her coma—especially seeing as the final game in the series (currently in production as of time of writing) is called awakening sarah. I'll be extremely disappointed if this ends up being the case, but I also think that in a way this would make the series loop around from dull to absurdly funny.

also, wishing sarah definitely has a bit more life to it when it comes to environments, and settles itself into a space similar to that of something like oneshot or undertale, where environments are more grounded in reality but have a combination of strange fantastical elements and a focus on incidental npcs adding flavor to spaces by way of eccentric dialogue. I don't know that I would say the game does this especially well, but I can at least say that "investigate a murder scene in a village of slightly unsettlingly twee animal people" and "walk around an old woman's house grabbing her lost things as she gradually forgets who you are and seems to nihilistically anticipate her approaching death" are definitely more inspired concepts than "you are in the volcano level. the lava is rising"

there's a teaser for awakening sarah that's been out for some time now, and the game's had a demo out on steam for a few years. I'll probably play it to see how things shake out, but it's gonna have to do some really heavy lifting to make up for a shallow opening and a somewhat more interesting but ultimately vague and meandering interlude. there's at least something to be admired for the bravery of explicitly following in the footsteps of a game like yume nikki, and although this game may be lacking in many regards, I don't get the impression that it's made without heart. it just turns out that trying to make the surreal-cult-classic lightning strike twice is really fucking hard!

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