I bought the "early access" version of "Dreams" two days ago, and I'm of mixed opinions about it.

On the one hand, it's like Doom 2016's "SnapMap" times fifty: the sheer volume of logic elements, the ability to segregate them into separate containers, the full-on geometry shaping, the animation system, the sound-related features, and so forth, make it easily the most sophisticated "in-engine" level editor I've ever seen, by some margin.

On the flip-side, it makes me wish that it was a little more engineering-oriented: how do you handle source control and versioning? How do you smoothly merge and back out contributions absent some kind of pull-request mechanism? How do you handle continuous integration? How do you do unit testing? It does have a configurable grid, but I also wish it had some kind of alternative blueprint mode, like traditional editors. I also miss the option to plug in a keyboard and just write code, versus fussing with always-drifting gyroscopic drag-and-dropping for everything.

It's tantalizingly close to crossing the boundary from "level editor" to "full-on GCS", which is actually what makes it kind of frustrating, sort of like the "uncanny valley" effect, where the closer something gets to looking real, the more obvious its flaws become. As the product stands right now, I think "Dreams" is just going to be a dumping ground of ten-minute "experiences" versus full-on thirty or forty hour games.

To play devil's advocate in the completely opposite direction, I wish full game engines like "Unity" or "Unreal" were more like "Dreams" in terms of feeling "gamified". Granted, those engines do support fully-scripted simple games, but it's just not as polished. And implementing code requires "Visual Studio", which just feels like overkill for most things. So some kind of middle ground would be perfect-- the intuitiveness and level-editor feel of "Dreams", but with alternative "hardcore" modes, with actual coding, unit and integration testing support, GitHub integration, and keyboard plus mouse capabilities.

I still think though that on the balance, my all-time favorite and most fun-to-use GCS is "STOS", on the Atari ST: you write code through a gamified-like editor, so it satisfies my programming itch, but you use graphical tools like a full-on sprite animator and music composer right alongside.