As I think I've mentioned before, the Sega consoles flew right past me as a child. I have more fingers on one hand than I know people who owned a Mega Drive, and I couldn't tell you anyone who owned a Saturn and insisted that I play Nights into Dreams, a chilled version of Sonic the Hedgehog, you might say, with more depth and fewer animals.
Dream energy is getting stolen from unsuspecting dreamers Elliot and Claris, and it is up to a flying jester-looking guy called Nights to help them get it back. It's the right thing to do, I suppose.
Fun Times
That right there is Nights into Dreams in a nutshell. You wonder around Nightopia as Elliot or Claris for a nanosecond before getting mugged by some obviously evil dudes who trap your precious dream energy inside giant cages. The only way to get this energy back is to leg it to the 'Spawn a flying Jester to help you' platform, summon Nights, and get flying.
Darting and dashing through the scenery is both freeing and guided, as you're locked to a single plane through warped, twisted and dream-like environments, but you can navigate up and down and back and forth along it, even pulling off spins and flips, probably in the name of points.
You'll pass through rings to up your score, but it's collecting blue orbs quickly that you ought to be focused on, as you'll need a certain amount of them in order to smash open the cages with them, thus freeing a bit of dream energy, allowing you to return to whichever child it belongs to and give it back.
Do this another three times and you'll be whisked away to the end of stage boss, which often looks far more interesting than anything else in the game. One boss has requires you to bounce on his head until his tail shrinks. Obviously. Another has you grab and throw her through the walls of her palace. As you do. It all makes perfect sense in make-believe.
Frustrations
Each child has three separate stages, complete with their own theme and boss, before sharing a final stage. It's a short game where the challenge comes from perfecting your runs through the level to finish them quicker, and more accurately.
It also bores me to no end, and that's not its only problem.
Nights into Dreams is slick with its controls. The original release had some versions come with a newly designed analogue controller for better control, and a modern enough Xbox 360 controller on a Nights into Dreams PC remaster certainly shows those slick controls off.
It's great that you are locked to a plane to really enjoy the movements you can pull off, dashing and swooping through rings and avoiding obstacles. It's when the whole thing moves too fast and you lose track of where the plane even is that things start to get a bit hectic.
You're locked into a path, and that path may, at some point, wrap around an object in the middle of the stage - an object you've seen in the background and wondered how to get there - for example. You'll likely see those background objects - perhaps because they're the blue orbs you need - but have no idea how to get to them, and will waste time trying to figure it out before just going sideways like you probably always should.
So sideways you go, and the stage twists and turns and you've lost all sense of direction. Are you close to the end? Where's the caged orb? Have I passed it? I must have passed it because I've looped back to the start of the run. How did that happen?
Couple that with a camera that can't always keep up and the odd occasion where you very clearly find, bump into, and scrape along the ceiling of a stage, and you've got a game that makes you feel both incredibly skilled at and undeniably useless at flying. And I'm just not sold on it.
Final Word
Is this a game you must play? It looks unlike most of what you've seen before. It may even play unlike anything you've seen before. It most likely has a theme and story you've not ventured into before, but does all of that make Nights into Dreams a must play?
I'd seen this game here and there in the past and thought little of it. It's apparently this great little gem of a title from the guys behind Sonic the Hedgehog, but that wasn't enough to get me on board to try it out. I was put off by the looks. It looks arcadey and shallow. It wasn't until the 1001 list that I tried it out first hand.
While I only played twenty minutes of it, I saw how, yes, it is a game you should play. For twenty minutes, or however long it takes for you to get bored of it. The flight mechanics - the whole point of the game - don't take too long to get the hang of, and when you chain together a neat little section through a bunch of rings, into some orbs, before smashing your target to pieces, it feels great. Then I snapped back into reality when I hit the ceiling again.
I'm a little divided on this one. It's good. I've seen far worse. I like the boss fights, but I don't want to play the game to reach them. I doubt I've really helped sell it to you, but yeah, you should at least try Nights into Dreams for yourselves - so I don't have to.
Fun Facts
You'd have thought the idea for Nights into Dreams came in a dream, but it came while waiting for a plane to take off.
Nights into Dreams, developed by Sonic Team, first released in 1996.
Version played: PC, 2012.
Version watched: Sega Saturn, 1996 (Lord Karnage, SpeedMarathonArchive)