Freeware Pick: Oneiric Gardens (Lilith)

Play any of Lilith's games, and you'll feel it - the unnerving collection of mismatched structures, the feeling of enclosure even outdoors, the nebulous blur of textures wrapped around every object like a fake skin, all lending to a sometimes unnerving, sometimes joyous, but undeniably dreamlike quality.

While many games strive to capture the surreality of dreams, there is something about the thick, heavy, low poly nature of Lilith's worlds and atmospheres that are so truly dreamlike. This is especially true of Oneiric Gardens, her latest game which you can download for free here.

Oneiric Gardens is an interpretation of landscapes, drawn, in Lilith's own words, "from half-remembered spaces, feelings." While I can't know what these spaces or feelings are firsthand, it's easy to see the process of translation in her game. In a way, making my own connections with the designer's virtualized memories was the most important part of the experience.

Structurally speaking, the world is laid out as a series of locations, some encased in the bulky facade of a building, others reached via portal. You're free to explore each world and connected world and see what they have to offer. Since discovery is half the fun, I won't go into details.

The all-encompassing world of Oneiric Gardens is small, but who said smaller spaces are a bad thing? In the limited spaces of Oneiric Gardens, there is atmosphere - thick and heavy as a deep sleep.

If I must make a comparison, I'd point to LSD: Dream Emulator as a similar experience, for its shared, low poly aesthetic reminiscent of the PSX, and the way (in both games) the player is able to draw value from the process of exploration over anything else.

Download Oneiric Gardens for free on itch.io. If you want to support Lilith's work, the download page includes an option for donations.