“For meget drøm / Too much dreaming” by Kristian Torgard, Lasse Johan Hansen & Claus Frøhlich.
“[A] game where you look for treasures from the real world on the surface of a surrealistic colourful planet inhabited with strange monsters, plants, buildings and even cars. When you find a treasure […] the planet begins to collapse. […] The dream repeats if you fall, but confronting all the ‘real’ items will maybe let you wake up.”
Some games do not offer you a clear narration, but instead a scenario, in which you can dive in, and “For meget drøm / Too much dreaming” is definitely one of them. You will be thrown into a strange looking dreamscape, where flat neon dogs bark at you, where little unidentified flying objects as well as aliens float around, where groups of unknown plants grow and where you can find oddly familiar treasures, like giant scissors or a cuckoo clock. But whenever you take one of those items and afterwards go over a crack of this planet, a part of it will rumble and fly right towards the galaxy. This way it will stay as a witness of the destruction, caught between reality and the surreal dream you are facing. It is stunning to look at it in these moments and still surprising, even when one knows what is coming.
Even though this jam submission does not tell its players what the dream is actually about, one can easily come up with an own interpretation. After my first playthrough of “For meget drøm / Too much dreaming”, I thought it might be the near-death experience of a small child after a car accident in form of an odd dream. While the pen, the scissors and the teddy bear are symbols of the childhood itself, the clock would represent the rapidly decreasing lifetime.
“But what is the cassette standing for?”, you might ask. It could be the reason for the accident, as the cassette is always surrounded by cars on the planet. Maybe the driver of the car was not careful enough when they wanted to hear their favorite song and did not look at the street while operating the radio, and then it came to the deadly crash. Of course, that is just my personal theory of what the atmospheric altgame “For meget drøm / Too much dreaming” is about. >>PLAY
