Nights into dreams free#

didn't go back right away, stayed out and earned more points?' Then one night, a purple jester flies into your dreams and flicks a switch in your brain.

So you return to the start, are awarded a 'C' grade for your efforts, and you wonder what you did to deserve that.

Nights into dreams free#

Our hero is bound to a two-dimensional plane and must collect 20 blue orbs scattered around each course to free a shinier orb from its squid-like 'Ideya Capture', then return to the start before time runs out. There may still be time to order your NiGHTS onesie for Christmas. One minute you're steering a car across the forest, the next careening through a museum made of rubber.

Each stage is a different dream to be conquered before Claris or Elliot wakes up - the alarm clock's hands grow ever louder as the seconds tick away, chasing you across the level if you run out of time - and in these dreams, any semblance of physical realism gives way to enchanting, impossible fantasy. Rings explode in all dimensions as you pass through them, NiGHTS leaving a twinkling contrail in its wake, crumpling with the speed of the dash. With the Saturn's dinner plate-sized 3D controller in hand, you've barely got time to enjoy the azure skies whizzing past.

You enter each dream as a child and walk around for all of five seconds before NiGHTS blasts out of its prison like a fizzing magenta firework. And what an answer it was: flying through children's dreams as an androgynous purple jester, it was Sega at its most creative - and, perhaps, its most commercially suicidal. Then there was NiGHTS Into Dreams, Sonic Team's answer to Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot. I remember a lot from Christmas 1996, the year when I got my Sega Saturn: my mum button-mashing her way to victory in Virtua Fighter 2, my granddad driving safely within the speed limit in Sega Rally.