Long Dream

Long Dream is a short Chinese pixel-art narrative game about Zhao Sheng, a retired postman whose dementia has slowly hollowed out his memories — except for one. He insists, with absolute certainty, that his partner Qi Mei is waiting for him under a specific peach tree. The image will not leave his head, and his family, refusing to let him go to his end with that regret unanswered, decide to set out and find the tree.

The game tells its story by drifting backwards through the layers of Zhao Sheng's memory: small daily moments with his family after retirement, encounters with villagers while delivering their mail, the births of his children, the years he spent in the army. Qi Mei is present in each of those memories. As his illness worsens, the boundary between recollection and current reality starts to dissolve, and the narrative lets the player follow what's happening from inside that confusion rather than from a safe external vantage.

The presentation is intentionally rough — crude, simple pixel art that the developers describe as crude on purpose — but the writing carries the emotional weight without needing technical polish to do the work. The full playthrough runs three to four hours, with humorous dialogue threaded through the heavier moments and a series of twists that recontextualise what you thought you understood about Zhao Sheng's history. The question the game leaves open is whether the peach tree exists at all, and whether finding it matters more than the journey his family takes trying to.