A Dream About Parking Lots

Interactive Dreams is an excellent studio name, especially when you consider the games they make. Their debut, A Dream About Parking Lots, doesn’t just spend time considering the dreams you’re having; you are actually participating in your dreams while talking to your therapist about them. And with all of this based on personal experiences, you can be sure that these feel very lifelike.

The game starts out with you in the parking lot of a shopping centre. You have your key in hand, and by pressing its button, you can locate your car when you’re getting near. This first setting is pretty straightforward: there are a couple of rows of cars, and in one of the rows you’ll find your own car. But that’s just the start.

These dreams are reoccurring, and the deeper you go into them, the more intricate and convoluted these parking lots get. They become mazes through which you have to find your way. In one dream, you’ll hear your car but not see it anywhere until you realise that there are multiple floors to the parking lot. In another, you have to find your way through an entire camping spot, with tens upon tens of cars and plenty of things blocking your way. Surely, this isn’t just about finding your car?

That’s what your conversations with your therapist certainly allude to. As you walk around these spaces, you are explaining what your dreams are like. Something I really enjoy about these conversations, as someone who has visited a therapist consistently for the past decade, is how true to life these conversations feel. The therapist isn’t just there to give you answers to your questions; they’re there to help you find your own. Sometimes that will be through gentle nudging; sometimes that will be through more direct communication.

Every so often you get dialogue choices, making you choose your own answers to their enquiries. These make it clear that you are struggling with some existential stuff. Feeling lost in your dreams has long been a reflection of figuratively feeling lost in real life. Your therapist tries to guide you through these feelings, often choosing to let you answer your own questions yourself. But it’s clear that you are struggling to fully realise what’s going on.

Later on in the game, it becomes apparent that you’re not just feeling lost. You’re a creative person who has lost their spark, and in that moment of feeling lost, you’ve gone looking for clarity. You need to make sense of everything, just to regain a certain sense of control. The question is :why? Does it help you to understand, even if things are just completely senseless?

The game’s depiction of this typical human need for control, for understanding, is depicted really well. When the therapist decides that they need to take a more direct approach, you become a little more defensive, as if they’re invading a space you weren’t ready to share yet. All the while, you just keep on looking for that car. You NEED to get to that car so you can leave. You need the world to be logical and structured so you can make sense of it.

The writing in this game is just really good, even when it gets a little meta near the end. There’s plenty of nuance and attention to detail, something I think you can only really achieve by having lived through these experiences yourself. It’s one of those games that, although light on gameplay, could only really bring its message across in a video game format.

The impact of a story like this is just bigger when you are the one interacting with the therapist in the dream world you visit every night than it would be if someone was just telling you this story. And I’m glad to have experienced it. I struggled a little late on in the game when all of a sudden, there were dialogue options for the therapist as well. For a second, I was jolted out of my character and into someone else’s shoes, but luckily, A Dream About Parking Lots makes sense of it all by the time you finish it.

If you have struggled with mental health issues, or even if you’ve just felt lost in life or in certain situations, I really recommend giving this gaming experience a go. It’s only a touch over half an hour long, so it won’t occupy too much of your time, but it does raise some interesting questions and will make you think about your own life in a new way.

It helps that the game is fun to walk around in as well. The game’s visuals take inspiration from the early PlayStation days, and your walking pace is just fast enough not to be annoyingly slow, even if it never gets to running speed at any time. The mazes are laid out in a way that makes sense, so you’ll never get completely lost. There are always environmental clues on which way you need to go, so there’s no need to retread your steps for too long. The only time that happens is when the game wants you to, as you’ll notice with the conversations always just being over by the time you reach your car.

It would seem that this kind of interactive experience is what we can expect in the future from this developer. In May, they released another short game, Swann’s Song, and it looks like that one takes its time to dwell on life and death and everything in between as well. I’ll definitely be checking that out as well, because it’s clear there’s wisdom in Interactive Dreams’ words.