Dream Cage is a scary anomaly hunting game with tedious mechanics

There are many games that have you hunting down anomalies, and many of them have horror elements, too, but there’s something about Dream Cage that makes it particularly unsettling. Perhaps it’s because it’s supposedly been made after its developer, Hitori De Productions, had conversations with those who suffer from sleep paralysis, capturing what terrifies us most.

In any case, if you’re brave enough to give Dream Cage a try, you’ll find yourself confined to a small apartment, and it quickly becomes clear that something is going on. Doors open and close by themselves, and you hear strange noises, and so the question is, are you really alone? Grabbing your camera, your only hope of survival is weeding out the anomalies around the apartment, all the while managing your fear level.

The problem is, Dream Cage throws you in at the deep end and doesn’t really explain itself to you very well at all. After some fumbling around you might find the camera that you need to really get going in the game, but after using it to unsuccessfully hunt for anomalies and dying a few times, you might get frustrated and throw in the towel.

You might, like me, think that you need to scan for ghosts, hunting down the entity in your apartment and getting annoyed when trying to capture it doesn’t seem to work. But no, what you need to do is hunt for typical anomalies like in other games within the genre. A large amount of blood splatter might not appear in the bathroom when you’re not looking through your camera, for example.

Dream Cage isn’t all that different from other anomaly hunting games, then; only its creepy goings-on as you hunt down differences will no doubt put you on edge. And there are other aspects to it that make it more challenging than most. You’ll need to have your microphone on to play, for one, and if you happen to cause too much noise by jumping out of your skin, it’s game over.

But what lets it down is a focus on resource management, which just adds unnecessary tedium to the whole affair. To use your camera you need to find batteries, which are spawned randomly in various places. And using your camera steadily increases your fear level due to the horrifying things you unveil, with the only way to manage that being to take pills, which you’ll also need to find.

Ultimately, you could end up spending more time in Dream Cage seeking out pills and batteries than actually hunting anomalies. It’s a shame, as there’s certainly an engaging time to be had, with some genuinely creepy moments. Unless you’re prepared to constantly be searching cupboards for items required to stay alive and capture anomalies, however, you might want to give this a miss.

Dream Cage is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.