Reviews | Hokko Life And Joon Shining - Nights Into My Dreams
Did you know? In 1996, Sega released Nights into Dreams for the aptly named Sega Saturn. At that exact moment, at that exact time in history: millions of children learned what it was like to dream. Everyone else got to labour religiously over the idea of dreaming in plastic-paged gaming magazines filled with shrunken heads and violent typefaces. The promise of Nights into Dreams was a release from the constant inertia and noise of the world outside of it.
*SEGA*
For the rest of the video game-loving public, most of which were children in rural, isolated towns, Nights into Dreams was like a promise that video games were out there. A breezy action platformer where anything was possible? Racing jester spirits through the skies to liberate the minds of the waking person. A neo-technicolor reality of sparkling bubbles and bright rings.
Joon Shining has some of that texture in it: the echo of kids who cry out for a softer world and green-velvet grass with nostalgic checkerboards. Crayon paintings of trees and flowers and the strange abstract creatures that call them home. The silence and sound of the wind passing through, never the same as before, a gentle stranger making an invisible path through all of it.
Where am I? Out for a day on the links?
A title in the Puzzle-Golf-Adventure genre, a portrait of a Jester too close to your ear. Closer now, hear his breathing. He licks the sweat from his lips and before they can touch the outer rim of your ear. He whispers “Golf.” Silence, like a droning over takes you and the wind is once again all there is. I want to be free, free from this bouncing eggs off of shimmering and glistening cubes. I want to fly.
The levels just keep coming. Bounce mirrors. Flying hoops. Egg-eaters and chaos critters. My magician steers ever onward, silent, only contemplating what’s directly in front of him. What is a dream, only happening around you, focused only on moving one small point in the world forward. Maybe the fantasy is dead, and my prison is to be chained to this earthly egg. Always one goal away from hatching it.
Where’s the debt collecting raccoon hiding?
No, no, I’m awake. It’s morning. I have a big day ahead of me – I have to play Hokko Life for startmenu.com, but the GUI immediately sends me into a type of trauma response: a hollowed-out ringing noise not unlike the GameCube startup sound. It’s all imagined: the bug-eyed creature on the character creator screen is me-unlike-me. A facsimile, an image, neither apparently relative to the real nor bizarre enough that there’s room to interrogate. I’m me. I have my whole Hokko Life ahead of me, and there’s these cute graphics in the corner to tell me what day of the week it is.
No no, this is a Nintendo Nightmare now, creeping in. I don’t want to work for another town of villagers. I don’t want to buy another house. I don’t want to cut down any more trees. I want to sleep, I want to chase the sky and I want to dream.
