We all have weird dreams, but have you ever had a dream about a naked fella who’s looking for a golden hot dog in a dreamlike world? Well then you might enjoy Hot Dog Dreamer.
Hot Dog Dreamer is a short exploration and platforming game made in 72 hours for the Hot Dog Jam back in 2017, but I only recently stumbled onto it via the excellent curation of Warp Door. It’s also a game that made me smile ear to ear for the ten minutes or so that it took me to complete it, and it all has to do with the tone of the game. You might think that a game about a nude man sent on a quest by a dream being in a hot dog suit might be silly or wacky, but Hot Dog Dreamer feels serious and thoughtful throughout. It feels like a real dream, especially ones where strange things happen that seem totally normal.
I asked creator AHintofLime via direct message about the reason for creating a game about a hot dog dreamscape, and he told me that he was as interested in games about dreams as he was games about hot dogs. He imagined a world of “full hot dog saturation” and “a plane of pure hot dog perfection” where the game would end. Everything up to that point was created as a dreamlike space. “I was probably also rewatching the third season of Twin Peaks at the time,” he told me, “so dreams and such were probably on the mind.”
You can play Hot Dog Dreamer by downloading it for free over at itch.io. Careful, though: you don’t want to get stuck in the hot dog realm.