She Dreams Elsewhere Preview

She Dreams Elsewhere is a surreal adventure. You explore the dreams and real life of Thalia, an anxiety-ridden, comatose woman on a journey to confront the nightmares preventing her from awakening.

The gameplay is like Pokemon, but the aesthetic is very different. You wake up in a foggy haze with one hell of a headache. The way ahead is dark and foreboding. You remember who you are, but not how you got there. As you explore the monochrome world the screen fractures or colours change as you take on battles with the characters you meet.

As the game swings back and forth between battles, exploration and conversation you discover an amalgam of game styles. What holds them together is not the mechanics of the game but the ethos and unsettling emotion. Along the way you explore themes of mental health and self-identity, not as theoretical subjects but from within the malleable interior of your character wrestling with these things.

With the growth of conversations about mental health, the developer hopes the game will highlight the reality of these things in everyday life. "Not only accepting and normalizing that, but also understanding that we don't have to not be okay all the time. There's support systems in place and different ways to cope, and I've really enjoyed exploring those different angles throughout the story and characters.”