There aren’t many games that leave you speechless, for whatever reason that might be: you can feel bemused by Thank Goodness You’re Here, empty by Omori, or stunned by Spec Ops: The Line. Then you have those very rare games, like A Dream About Parking Lots, where you’re silent because you simply don’t know what to think.
A Dream About Parking Lots, which arrived on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch today (July 31) is, in essence, exactly what it says. You play as a nameless, faceless person navigating through a handful of recurring, increasingly grander car park-based dreamscapes in which you’re trying to find your vehicle.
Your only tool to locate it is your key fob, which you click passively as you try to locate your wheels. As you go, you speak with your therapist about these dreams, trying to unpick why you’re so laser-focused on discovering your vehicle. It’s weird, but it’s also an incredibly personal story for its developer; for $5, you’ve got approximately 35 minutes to figure out if it’s for you, too.
A Dream About Parking Lots comes from Interactive Dreams, a small indie developer from Mexico that is more than happy to use the same, plain directness with its own name as it does for its debut title. This light walking simulator is based on real dreams, with choose-your-own-adventure-style narration through the therapy conversations, and aims to explore “feelings of being lost, creative paralysis, and the blurry edges between memory, dream, and reality.”
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There’s not much more I can say about the story without spoiling it — it’s the length of an episode of Only Murders in the Building, and dramatically slower and much less twisty than my current Disney+ obsession. Still, Interactive Dreams makes you work hard to like A Dream About Parking Lots, between its basic mechanics (movement speed is “slow” or “a bit less slow”) and visuals that push the good intentions of the phrase “dream-like.”
After completing the game, many players will wonder why they bothered, and I get that. Still, while this isn’t exactly a glowing review, I liked it, for the most part. The dialogue is solid, making you feel like a personal player in the cast — one who must think for themselves based on their reality. It sometimes makes you physically stop in your tracks to consider and then answer questions, even if your sole, mindless task is to find a beeping car. Maybe you don’t want to find it just yet.
There’s also a moment where, like the magnificent Despelote, the curtain is cleverly lifted. It’s certainly not as dramatic or, if you’re paying real attention to the narrative, connective, because A Dream About Parking Lots is such a slow burner that a lot of people will understandably miss its rarer moments of nuance. This’ll only increase dramatically when the TrueAchievements mob realizes that it’s one of the easiest and cheapest 1,000G completions in recent memory, rushing through it for a thrill rather than its subtleties.
A Dream About Parking Lots may give you a surprisingly personal experience; for me, who’s no stranger to therapy and recurring dreams, it was a much more open-ended game — one I didn’t dislike, but not one I’d jump out of my seat to recommend. Still, I can’t stop thinking about it; Interactive Dreams certainly has the chops to go on to greater things, and I’m here for that.
