One Dreamer is a premium adventure game from the One Dreamer Company. This story-rich 2D platformer puts you in the shoes of a game developer who discovers the source code in the real world, allowing him to change things around him. You utilize this newfound ability to fulfill a lifelong dream.

Its premise feels like the films Ruby Sparks or Come True, with its retro graphics bearing similarities with Crossy Road for Windows 10. More importantly, it has that game-within-a-game feel similar to Hacker Simulator as it features user-friendly pseudocode heavily based on real-world programming languages.

One line of code at a time

One Dreamer has a story that gradually grows heavier as you play it. It’s both casual and immersive that real-world developers will relate to it and others will get a glimpse of their lives. The game lets you reprogram how objects function or how to eliminate obstacles. You can pull up a console, key in a line of code, and see how the world around you changed.

While the word programming in a video game sounds daunting, this game actually makes the effort to keep it accessible. It has a fictional in-game programming language based on C#. The game provides opportunities for you to grasp the mechanics, such as replacing real-world objects by changing their “filename” in your program. You can then play around with over 100 puzzles that include clearing passages to completing mini-games.

It goes without saying that real-world programmers have the advantage, to which you might go through the entire game in a flash. If you have the grasp of what to do, the game actually has a short playthrough. However, the wealth of content it offers as well as the possibilities you can experiment on, makes this game replayable for a couple of runs.

An introspective experience

One Dreamer feels like a personal project. Its premise brings the plight of a lot of indie game developers to the public, not just from the challenges of creating a video game for people to enjoy but also a glimpse into coding. Its use of retro graphics, a programming console with a pseudocode language, and its surprising ending all wrap the ideas of the developers in a neat little package.