What if the things you saw during a nightmare weren’t really nightmares at all? That’s the unsettling question at the heart of Dream Cage, a new horror experience from JanduSoft that traps players inside five nights of increasingly disturbing sleep paralysis.
Available now on Xbox Series X|S, PC and PlayStation 5, it is a game that wants you to keep your eyes open, your wits about you and, most importantly, your mouth shut.
At A Glance
- Game: Dream Cage
- Price: £8.79
- Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PC, PlayStation 5
- Publisher: JanduSoft
- Developer: JanduSoft
Five Nights, Five Nightmares
Dream Cage puts you in the troubled mind of Robert, a 50-year-old man dealing with memory problems and insomnia. His nights are already difficult enough, but sleep paralysis brings something far more sinister into the equation.
Each of the game’s five nights introduces a different entity, with the creatures designed around accounts from people who have experienced sleep paralysis themselves. That real-world inspiration gives the horror a particularly uncomfortable edge, as Dream Cage isn’t simply throwing monsters at the player for the sake of it.
Instead, you’re left wondering what is real and what might be the product of Robert’s increasingly unreliable mind.
Silence Is Your Best Weapon
There is an unusual twist to surviving these encounters: you need to stay quiet.
Dream Cage uses your microphone to capture sound, meaning screaming or making noise could have consequences. It’s a neat way of making the player part of the horror, especially when something terrifying is happening on screen and your natural reaction is probably going to be anything but silence.
Survival isn’t the only thing going on either. Dream Cage asks players to investigate their surroundings and search for more than 25 anomalies, with those discoveries gradually helping to piece together the mystery surrounding Robert. Memory lapses can also interfere with the experience, while pills can be found to help restore his ability to function properly. Random hauntings add another layer of unpredictability, ensuring that searching for clues isn’t necessarily a calm affair.
There are two possible endings too, although only one reveals the full truth behind Robert’s ordeal. That gives completionists a reason to dig deeper and search for every anomaly rather than simply reaching the end of the five-night ordeal.
A Horror Experience Built Around Unease
At £8.79, Dream Cage is taking a relatively compact approach to horror, focusing its attention on atmosphere, investigation and the strange sensation of being trapped inside your own mind.
The combination of sleep paralysis, unexplained anomalies and microphone-based scares certainly gives it a hook of its own. Whether you can keep your composure long enough to uncover everything is another matter entirely.
Dream Cage is available now on Xbox Series X|S (through the Xbox Store), PC and PlayStation 5.
