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Forbes
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘A Dream About Parking Lots' Review (Xbox): A Weird Way To Spend $5
There aren't many games that leave you speechless, for whatever reason that might be: you can feel bemused by Thank Goodness You're Here, empty by Omori, or stunned by Spec Ops: The Line. Then you have those very rare games, like A Dream About Parking Lots, where you're silent because you simply don't know what to think. A Dream About Parking Lots, which arrived on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch today (July 31) is, in essence, exactly what it says. You play as a nameless, faceless person navigating through a handful of recurring, increasingly grander car park-based dreamscapes in which you're trying to find your vehicle. Your only tool to locate it is your key fob, which you click passively as you try to locate your wheels. As you go, you speak with your therapist about these dreams, trying to unpick why you're so laser-focused on discovering your vehicle. It's weird, but it's also an incredibly personal story for its developer; for $5, you've got approximately 35 minutes to figure out if it's for you, too. A Dream About Parking Lots comes from Interactive Dreams, a small indie developer from Mexico that is more than happy to use the same, plain directness with its own name as it does for its debut title. This light walking simulator is based on real dreams, with choose-your-own-adventure-style narration through the therapy conversations, and aims to explore 'feelings of being lost, creative paralysis, and the blurry edges between memory, dream, and reality.' FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder There's not much more I can say about the story without spoiling it — it's the length of an episode of Only Murders in the Building, and dramatically slower and much less twisty than my current Disney+ obsession. Still, Interactive Dreams makes you work hard to like A Dream About Parking Lots, between its basic mechanics (movement speed is 'slow' or 'a bit less slow') and visuals that push the good intentions of the phrase 'dream-like.' After completing the game, many players will wonder why they bothered, and I get that. Still, while this isn't exactly a glowing review, I liked it, for the most part. The dialogue is solid, making you feel like a personal player in the cast — one who must think for themselves based on their reality. It sometimes makes you physically stop in your tracks to consider and then answer questions, even if your sole, mindless task is to find a beeping car. Maybe you don't want to find it just yet. There's also a moment where, like the magnificent Despelote, the curtain is cleverly lifted. It's certainly not as dramatic or, if you're paying real attention to the narrative, connective, because A Dream About Parking Lots is such a slow burner that a lot of people will understandably miss its rarer moments of nuance. This'll only increase dramatically when the TrueAchievements mob realizes that it's one of the easiest and cheapest 1,000G completions in recent memory, rushing through it for a thrill rather than its subtleties. A Dream About Parking Lots may give you a surprisingly personal experience; for me, who's no stranger to therapy and recurring dreams, it was a much more open-ended game — one I didn't dislike, but not one I'd jump out of my seat to recommend. Still, I can't stop thinking about it; Interactive Dreams certainly has the chops to go on to greater things, and I'm here for that.
Yahoo
26-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
He made a viral horror game in 2 months – it sold 6 million copies, and now he can make whatever he wants for the rest of his life: "My final theory is that gambling is very fun"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. There's a clear before and after moment in the career of (mostly) solo game dev Mike Klubnika. He's been making short, grungy games for years, but it wasn't until the 2024 release of Buckshot Roulette, a Russian roulette-style gambling sim where you let a shotgun decide your fate in a wager with a monstrous underground casino dealer, that he saw massive commercial success. And it was massive. With a game made in two months, first launched on and then on Steam, and later expanded with a hotly demanded multiplayer update, Klubnika sold over 6 million copies, putting him in the coveted position of essentially never again needing to worry about what he creates or how it performs. On top of that, Buckshot Roulette has put millions of eyes on his next game, Split (or s.p.l.i.t), a short psychological horror game where you navigate hacker terminals, which is out on Steam today, July 24. Klubnika tells me this success hasn't changed his life all that "dramatically" apart from the obvious thing: "I can do game development full-time and not really worry that much about the commercial side of games. I feel like I can come up with an idea for a game and I can make it in a more peaceful way, knowing that if it doesn't sell well, or if it doesn't reach enough players, then it's not as big of a deal as it could be. So in a way, it's quite freeing. But it's also not really that different to what it was before, because I was never really worried about, oh, what if I put this game out and it doesn't sell enough copies? I wasn't even selling games that much. It was like, what if it doesn't get any downloads? I'm very grateful for it." The Buckshot Roulette launch was "pretty crazy," he recalls. "I remember I was at a friend's place, we had a movie night, and I had just released Buckshot like a week ago. We were looking at Twitch on the big screen. We're looking at people playing the game, and there were so many people streaming, and there were so many viewers. You could also see that the chat in the streams was going crazy, because everyone was like, oh no, that one's a blank, shoot yourself instead of shooting the dealer. It was just chaos. It was very insane. I was not expecting it at all." I asked Klubnika how he might explain Buckshot Roulette's meteoric launch. "I've been thinking about it for quite a bit," he begins. "I think, generally, obviously, it's just luck. Right game, right time." It's simple to pick up and play, he reasons, and it's fun to watch over a friend's shoulder or, indeed, on Twitch. He reckons the indie horror scene, the perfect home for the "dirty, grungy, sort of hostile" games and worlds he creates, was pretty quiet at the time, leaving the door open for a hit to dominate conversations. He tips his hat to Inscryption, a superb card game roguelike and a big inspiration for Buckshot Roulette, for its style of presentation, which people have clearly latched onto. "My final theory is that gambling is very fun," he adds. I think he might be onto something. With Split, Klubnika doesn't want or need a repeat of Buckshout Roulette. The joy of making short games, he says, and working on games like these two as a solo dev – though overall, he "wouldn't necessarily call myself a solo dev" between minor collaborations or outsourcing – is acting on ideas quickly and getting them out into the wild fast. He's "thought about" making a bigger game, but something like Split is perfect right now. Split is a bit more video game-y than most of Klubnika's games, he says, and has more narrative to it as well. You can beat it in under two hours, he reckons. It's $2.99 on Steam, like Buckshot before it, or $2.54 with the launch discount. This is just how he likes to create – the inverse of the enormous games that dominate the industry through update after update after time-devouring update. (The reason Split took a bit longer to make is Klubnika couldn't help himself from embellishing a separate game jam project called Fused 240, co-developed with Wriks). Increasingly, short games are punching far above their weight, and Klubnika, like me, hopes that trend continues. "Especially recently, I've kind of noticed that [trend] with Balatro and Peak," he says. "It's pretty crazy. I feel like, in terms of industry, it might have more of a focus. Shorter timelines. But I'm not really sure." Separately, he adds: "When we're talking about dev timelines of four months to five months, it just keeps it fresh. I'm already really looking forward to next projects, and it's always very interesting finishing something and starting from scratch all over again. You get to just explore new ideas, rather than just making the same type of content for the same project. So I just find it very refreshing and also very, I guess, scopable as a solo dev." "My savings had run out": In a few months, a Sonic 3 animator made an N64-style game based on an iconic Animal Crossing mechanic and chucked it onto Steam because "I needed to pay rent," and it worked
