The American Dream presents a slice of Americana in which guns are fetishized to their idiotic maximum; guns for cooking, guns for dancing, guns for marrying, and guns for childbirth. While The American Dream's action is adjacent to conventional VR shooting galleries, its vicious political commentary satirizes gun culture and leaves no survivors. The obliteration of reality appears to be a natural side effect of defending the indefensible.
The United States of America loves guns. Guns are a measure of power and constitutionally protected right. Guns are also devices specifically designed to kill other human beings and an object of masturbatory fantasy enjoyed by an alarming number of Americans. The American Dream magnifies gun culture and applies it to an idyllic delusion of a postwar United States.
The American Dream is constructed as theme park ride through a firearm-obsessed culture. Built by the fictional American Rifle Association, it returns to the halcyon days of the 1950’s and inserts guns into benign pieces of American life. Both Move controllers function as pistols (there are no hands). When it’s time for larger weapons, like a shotgun or a bolt-action rifle, one controller becomes a large gun while the other controller turns into a small gun with a smaller hand attached to the top. The tiny gun-hand can grip objects, making it perfect and extremely stupid for either cocking or loading the larger gun.
Adapting the form of an ordinary American life, The American Dream shuffles the player to escalating episodes from childhood to middle age. Each sequence presents a familiar scenario and creates a challenge that involves, what else, guns. Guns are presented as the obvious solution to every challenge, and no action may be taken that does not involve firing a gun. Like The Force, air, and the looming specter of death, guns are all around us and inseparable from life.
Wholesome Boomer daydreams are mocked without subtlety. Taking a date to the carnival required me to insert my rife in the candy machine, then eat cotton candy off of my rifle tip, then shove it in my date’s face so she could suck cotton candy off the barrel. Flipping burgers at the diner involved shooting meat patties off a burner and onto an assembly line. Dining at a nice restaurant required I use my diminutive silverware guns on the appropriate food course. When the beer dispensing machine somehow found its way into my home, I opened the can (which I held with the aforementioned tiny gun-hand) by firing a bullet into its top.
When The American Dream becomes a game, it adapts and conforms to the model of virtual reality shooting gallery. Throwing a football with your dad is a lesson in tracking and shooting moving targets. Shooting burgers off a burner is an exercise in management and timing. Defending your backyard party-of-one from birds (while using a machine gun to trim the hedges) is a low-key tower defense minigame. Gun mechanics, perhaps not ironically, compile a majority of videogame and virtual reality experiences. It’s a proven method of interaction, and it’s obviously fitting for a game obsessed with guns.
Like Arizona Sunshine and other PlayStation VR games, The American Dream struggles to maintain accuracy when two Move controllers are operating simultaneously. It seems to be a depth-perception issue, as it’s often troublesome to execute specific actions that may place two Move controllers in parallel. Cocking the bolt-action rifle, which is already arduous on purpose, is teeming with issues. The American Dream does have the decency to automate movement by fixing the player in a slow moving vehicle and, generally, progression isn’t limited by performance.
The American Dream also exhibits some distressing technical issues. I had to restart three different events because of scripting bugs. The kitchen segment was rampant with audio clipping issues. When objectives (like the final sequence) are left unclear, it’s hard to be sure if either you’re doing the wrong thing or if the game has bugged out. Perhaps The American Dream performs better through Vive or Oculus—improved control options also couldn’t hurt—but expect some obstacles from PlayStation VR.
The mouthpiece for The American Dream is Buddy Washington, a golden retriever. While gently providing direction to the player, Buddy is also responsible for lacing gun-obsessed propaganda inside of his instructions and loudly spitting every time he says the word “communist.” Think of Buddy like an ironic, wistful version of the voice in this infamous psychopathic call to arms. Michael Dobson, who voices Buddy, carries a perfect 50’s advertising agent tone, dripping with slime and conviction.
The American Dream is easier to imagine and fear from the perspective of an outsider. The United States, in its present form, appears violently unstable and susceptible to everyday acts of homegrown terrorism. Guns have enhanced the viability of public massacres, school shootings, and the always reliable statistic of suicide. When we export our culture to the world, we sometimes forget that it is symbiotically attached to our news and our politics. This perspective hardens when one notices Samurai Punk, The American Dream’s development team, hails from Australia, a country where it is much harder to obtain a gun.
This perspective of American gun culture is not unique to Australians. When I traveled to Japan, “Do you own a gun?” was usually the second question asked by affable Osakan locals. “Does everyone there own a gun?” was the third. When some friends were visiting my home state of Kentucky from Canada, they were profoundly alarmed by a man open-carrying a pistol in a bar. Furthermore, when the Unification Church’s combined mass wedding and gun ceremony made headlines last month, The American Dream’s wedding sequence—in which vows were enhanced by the second amendment—doesn’t seem so far-fetched. What we somehow interpret as normal behavior is seen as unhinged and grotesque to other cultures around the world.
From its midpoint until its conclusion, The American Dream starts cutting deeper. The shotgun can be repeatedly cocked until its tip glows white-hot and shoots a fireball. Changing a baby’s diaper reveals that it has defecated a tiny turd in the shape of a gun. A sequence in a Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse, where the player must match interminable serial numbers to locate a specific gun, is a deliberate exercise in futility. The American Dream is designed specifically to mock our proclivity for firearm hubris.
A bit of editing would have served The American Dream well. The length of certain scene transitions also makes replays (where you can hunt down hidden star targets in each level) a chore. Certain sequences seem endless when Buddy refuses to stop talking, and not every lobbed zinger lands on a bull’s-eye. The American Dream’s mission of enveloping the world in guns feeds on monotony and frenzied anxiety but, back in the land of videogames, it feels like padding.
The American Dream culminates in a sequence where the plot is lost and it transitions to monologuing boss encounter. This isn’t the least bit enjoyable to play, but it’s consistent with the natural end-cycle of popular cults. A point of no return comes and the leader exits reality in a blaze of presumed glory. Back in the real world, people suffer. The American Dream doesn’t quite have the prowess to address that phenomenon, but its comical indictment of its internal American Rifle Association is relentless. The game never apologizes.
Gun culture is an easy target and The American Dream shots aren’t exceptionally shrewd. One could argue that the ludicrous nature of the target doesn’t demand a galaxy brain to mount an attack, and that it’s treated with all of the respect it deserves. Given the perceived complexity of the issue and how strongly some Americans feel about its nature, it’s OK to neither appreciate The American Dreams’ politics nor enjoy its rudimentary gunplay. Or it could be a lively to spend an afternoon denigrating gun culture. It’s not like there’s a gun to your head.
The American Dream presents a slice of Americana in which guns are fetishized to their idiotic maximum; guns for cooking, guns for dancing, guns for marrying, and guns for childbirth. While The American Dream’s action is adjacent to conventional VR shooting galleries, its vicious political commentary satirizes gun culture and leaves no survivors. The obliteration of reality appears to be a natural side effect of defending the indefensible.
