Ever had a dream that you parked your car, but couldn’t find it in a sea of cars? Someone who made this did, and they turned their dreams into a game. This is a simple and short title that follows a character as they talk to a therapist while trying to find their car in various parking lots. Each level is a dream that you are recalling while you talk to the therapist. You are allowed to make some choices in dialogue. Once you have found your car, you have completed the level. Armed with a key fob and unlimited time, go find your car!

Here’s what I liked:

Simplistic Approach — The controls are quite basic. You press A to choose your dialogue options, X to honk your car and flash the lights, and when you finally find your car, you hit Y. That’s all that you have to do the entire game. It’s very short and basic, with no real effort to try to be anything more. It’s just a game made with inspirations from real dreams about walking around a parking lot. If you want to play something while multitasking, meanwhile getting extremely easy achievements, this may be what you’re looking for (besides the car, of course!).

Mazed and Confused — With it being simple, there are some levels that can be a bit confusing. There’s a few levels that can leave you a little frustrated, because they are somewhat bigger than the beginning levels and have a lot of debris or poorly parked cars blocking your path. There’s a parking garage where you have to go up a few flight of stairs that stood out to me. There’s also a soccer field type area that has a lot of open gates and dead ends. So if you really like mazes. you will like these levels a lot. Go around spamming the honk button, hoping to hear the faint sound of escape.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

Therapy in the Way — Each time you start a level, you will be talked to by your therapist. After making some choices in dialogue (it doesn’t matter at all what you say), you can finally start making your car honk and find it. The problem is, you cannot make your car honk while the talking is going on. You can still walk forward, but cannot detect your car until after these dialogue choices have been made. Not that the car is ever at the beginning, but the fun I had was spamming the button while I walked around. The therapist also asks a ton of questions about how you feel about parking lots. I get it, that’s what the game is about, but I’m not sure there is much of a deeper meaning. I don’t talk to a therapist personally, so I’m no professional on what goes on besides what I’ve seen in movies. I figure a lot about personal life would be brought up, and then there would be assumptions of why the dreams were happening. But the character doesn’t really open up a lot on a personal level. The dialogue got pretty boring very fast.

Slow Running — You can walk, but you can also sort of jog. This is done by holding the analogue stick down. My thumb got pretty sore doing this because you can’t let go. I didn’t check the settings to see if there was a click option, but that’s because the game is so short that I didn’t feel like going to the main menu and looking. While holding it down, you barely move faster.

That’s a Wrap — Once you’re finished playing the game, there is absolutely no reason to go back unless you missed an achievement. While I praise the simplistic approach of the game, I also was left with nothing by the end. No desire to play again, no catchy music, no wish to hear what the other dialogue options lead to in conversations with the therapist. Even walking simulator enthusiasts may be disappointed.

Wrap-up

Finding a car in a parking lot has been a subject in a few other forms of media. Take, for example, the classic show Seinfeld, where the group can’t find their car, and a lot of funny things happen during their search. Then in other video games where you park a car and do a side quest, only to forget where you parked the car and run around the blocks looking for it. At least it’s happened to me. It’s not a strange thing to dream about, because there are times when some people can’t find their cars. It has happened to me at a concert, and I couldn’t find my group. But I have learned from these mistakes, and now I either mark it on my phone or I glance around for a landmark I can remember. So it hasn’t happened to me in a very long time. Besides what I liked and didn’t like in this game, there wasn’t much to do, so I didn’t have too much to talk about. The game is incredibly short and doesn’t place your car in a random location. It is always in the same spot, giving no real depth to what was already thin.

Score: Limited Appeal

A Dream About Parking Lots was published and developed by Take IT Studio! sp. z o. o. on Xbox One. It was released on July 30 2025, for $4.99. A copy was provided for review