Wednesday 4 July 2007
GamesRadar forumites have unearthed a scan from a Japanese magazine which gives more clues as to the plot of the new NiGHTS game, Journey of Dreams, headed to Wii later this year.

From the scan (which is almost entirely in Japanese), it appears one of the two children to feature in the game is called Helen Cartwright - a girl with an obvious love of music. She can be seen playing her violin with an older girl in a still from a cutscene and can also be seen sleeping with her violin by her bedside. We're guessing this is where the bad dreams of stage-fright kick in.

Seeing as the female character from the first game, Claris Sinclair, dreamed of being a singer and Nightmarens entered her dreams to prey on her anxieties, everything here makes sense. Especially as another screenshot shows Helen fleeing from three ghostly demons - most likely before NiGHTS appears to save her in her dream.

Gameplay-wise, the screens finally show an orange hoop, which had been worryingly absent from previous screens, so it looks like the game will play similarly to the first. There are several new images of a previously unseen bird with a rider on its back, which NiGHTS grabs onto. The bird is coloured differently in many of the screens, which suggests it changes colour as it flies. Hey, anything can happen in a dream.

Above: Helen looks quite posh, but Claris would be about 25 now, so maybe it's time to move on

Another screenshot shows NiGHTS apparently imprisoned, with Helen looking up at him. The original game started with Claris or Elliot approaching the imprisoned NiGHTS and setting him free, so it seems the same will happen here.

So far, then, so good. We've yet to see the other child (almost certainly male), and we still don't know how the game plays - a lot of these images look like the camera is following NiGHTS, although that could well be an into-the-screen subsection.

We wouldn't be surprised if NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams made an appearance at E3, so hopefully we'll have much more solid details very soon. In the mean-time, head over to the forum post  and see the whole scan for yourself, then join the discussion.