NiGHTS into Dreams... Review

The freedom of flight appeals to nearly everyone; there's something magical about the ability to leave the ground and take to the skies. That fascination people have with flight is clearly what made the concept behind Nights Into Dreams so thrilling years ago, and it's what will draw people to the game even now.

If you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it!

As the story goes, a girl named Claris and a boy named Elliot have ventured into a world of dreams. Now they must save that magical world by teaming up with a purple flying creature known as Nights, the last of his kind to avoid capture by an evil army. You choose one of several courses, and at first you control one of the two children. Awkwardly, you wander the landscape until you reach a series of columns that encircle your airborne friend. Touching Nights causes him to take flight, and then you are free to soar through the skies for as long as two minutes.

Though Nights Into Dreams is an old design at its heart, it offers a liberating experience even by today's standards. Nights moves responsively, and he can perform air dashes and somersaults as he negotiates an aerial wonderland filled with magical rings that regenerate his energy meter. (Nights has no gender, incidentally, although we've referred to the jester as "he" for the purposes of this review.) That energy allows him to keep moving at high speeds while he collects blue orbs. Once he has gathered 20 orbs within the current portion of the course, he can toss them into a giant translucent bubble, and then he is permitted to return to the columns and begin flying through a new portion of the current course.

Collect the blue thingy-ma-bobbers or be sorry.

A certain number of restrictions are necessary to ensure that Nights Into Dreams works as a game. The most prominent of those restrictions is that if Nights doesn't return to the starting columns within two minutes, any orbs he has in his possession go flying everywhere like rings in a Sonic game after a collision with an enemy. Nights departs, and then you're left controlling the child, who fumbles around the landscape in an effort to collect and turn in orbs, just like his or her winged friend. However, a hostile pod is in pursuit by that point, and the game unceremoniously ends if the pod captures the youthful hero or heroine in its tractor beam. This dynamic adds tension to the experience while you're controlling Nights, because you want to do everything you can to avoid a risky reunion with the child, and yet you also want to collect as many orbs as possible before you return to the columns just ahead of the last few ticks of the timer.

At a glance, Nights Into Dreams is a platformer wherein you happen to fly a lot, but it feels more like a racing game when you're playing it properly. Speed runs are your goal, and your most capable enemy is the timer. You want to obtain 20 blue orbs as quickly as possible, and you want to turn those in promptly because then you can get more points by collecting additional orbs before finishing one of the four legs of the proper race. Courses that at first seem like a jumbled mess slowly take form as you memorize the location of jewel caches and try to move from one to the next without slowing down too much.