Picayune Dreams

The 28th of May, 2025

What have you been doing lately, Oshie?

Well, I’ve actually been playing a lot of Stardew Valley, like 50 hours of it, but I refuse to write about that game because I know literally all of you have already played it, likely more than I have.

Instead, I’ll talk about something I spent far fewer hours on: Picayune Dreams.

Picayune Dreams is a very interesting Survivors-like from the era of such a thing’s popularity. Having played the titular Survivors-like, I think Picayune Dreams is actually far superior.

So what does this one have that the name brand doesn’t?

I think Picayune Dreams stands on its own in a few areas. Firstly and most importantly, this game has a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end! It’s quite an interesting story too, a kind of Evangelion-esque narrative where a small team has to go into space to stop some unspeakable horror from wiping out humanity. Maybe you’re thinking that sounds a bit cliché in the big 2025, but that’s where I get to the second thing. Picayune Dreams has a very unique style. This style is pretty far-reaching, but it doesn’t draw from generic kinds of settings or tropes like Vampire Survivors does. It’s got its own very unique design language and vibe; this will be very clear to you even upon looking at the Steam page for it. It’s very artistically loud. The narrative is not played straight either; it’s presented in a surrealist way with little fragments between the action-heavy gameplay. The unique stylistic choices of the game even reach to the basic menus. When you level up and pick out weapon upgrades, instead of showing you the item name and a brief description like any other game would, Picayune Dreams instead opts to show you the code for each weapon. You can look at the game’s code when deciding on upgrades to see how they’d affect your build! This kind of furthers the artistic intent of the game, where you are some strange fusion of human and machine, some strange being beyond life or death. The game explores these concepts.

Now that takes me to the long-awaited third reason: the soundtrack on this game absolutely rips. I don’t say this lightly; you get some seriously banging breakcore-style music to blast through your speakers while playing the levels with remixes of each track depending on certain conditions of gameplay. These tracks absolutely slam; I have literally added them to my playlists so I can listen to them in my car.

As for how the game plays, obviously it’s a lot like Vampire Survivors, but I think it’s been greatly improved. Firstly, there is a very heavy deemphasis on the AFK-style gameplay and much more of a focus on active engagement from the player. The devs describe the game as a Bullet Heaven, and in some ways it does draw from our beloved bullet hells like Touhou. After each stage, there is a Touhou-esque boss for you to fight, each with their own spell cards. The game gives you full freedom of movement even during these moments, and the patterns are simple for the majority of the game, but even still, this is extremely interesting and makes running the game quite fun. Speaking of freedom, did I mention it’s a twinstick shooter?! You can fully control your aim, and often the game requires this of you, but there is also a simple auto-fire system that will aim automatically, a bit of the best of both worlds.

I think Picayune Dreams was really interesting; it’s absolutely the kind of thing that’s going to be forgotten about now that the hype around survivors-likes has died down, which makes me sad. I really encourage you guys to play this one. There’s lots of value here. I got it for three bucks, and it’s got a bunch of unlockables, tons of attention to detail, lots of little secrets, and 140 achievements to work through.