The Last Dream Collector turns psychological dream surgery into an Android narrative game

Indie narrative game The Last Dream Collector has arrived in early access on Google Play, with fresh coverage today highlighting one of the stranger mobile premises of the week. Players take the role of the final person capable of entering other people's dreams. Each night, the Collector explores the sleeping minds of residents in a small town and then decides whether to leave a dream untouched, restore it, alter it or erase it entirely.

Predictably, performing amateur subconscious maintenance on your neighbours has consequences. Decisions affect the town's reality and help determine how its inhabitants and wider story evolve. The game is built around managing dread as well as making narrative choices, giving the dream sequences more significance than simply being surreal sightseeing trips. Early-access status means development is still ongoing, so this is not being presented as a finished commercial release.

Even so, the premise gives The Last Dream Collector an immediate identity in a storefront frequently dominated by much louder genres. There are no assault rifles mounted on cars, no kingdom requiring twelve different currencies and, as far as we can tell, nobody is offering a limited-time £99.99 Dream Collector Value Chest. Sometimes the unsettling game about modifying strangers' subconscious memories is the refreshingly restrained option.