Dreaming Sarah on AnyPS5

Screenshots

No screenshot of this game running has been posted in the project's threads yet. Testers who reach a new screen usually post one in the discussion linked on the right.

Where it stands

Dreaming Sarah is a 2D game and the best-supported title in the project. It was an early test title, and a PR says the project's own compatibility list marks it playable. Several people report it reaches gameplay with working audio and controls, and runs at about 60 fps on Windows. The reports only cover the opening area (first forest level), so "playable" means that part, not a full playthrough.

The main problems are hardware and driver specific. On an AMD RX 6700 XT on Windows it crashed in the AMD graphics driver at the first real draw. A PR that works around it was closed by the project's new-contributor gate, not reviewed, and is now carried by another PR. On Linux, a user with v0.1.1 gets a segfault at start-up, and a Wine user on a Radeon Vega 8 gets a black window. Intel Arc on Linux was slow (4.5 fps, or 27-35 fps) until patches that are not merged yet.

It has also been a regression canary: a shader change made the screen black (reverted 2026-10-01) and a later change to a graphics command made it abort before the first frame (reverted 2026-10-10, after which main ran it at 59.9 fps). Slowdowns on Windows (12 fps) were fixed on 2026-10-09 by a texture re-upload fix.

Logs from a working run still show a few harmless-looking warnings: an unknown system module id (272), a missing water background shader file, and repeated notes about GPU results being kept as CPU blocks.

What is stopping it

• On Windows with AMD graphics (RX 6700 XT, Adrenalin 25.10), the game crashes inside the AMD driver at the first real graphics submission. A fix exists but is not merged. Thread
• Open PR carrying the AMD driver workaround (keep shader modules alive until pipeline libraries are destroyed). Thread
• Linux segfault at start-up on release v0.1.1 (Ubuntu). Thread
• A black window with no image on Linux under Wine (Radeon Vega 8) because the native relink segfaults. Thread
• Intel Arc on Linux needs extra patches to hold 60 fps: two speed-ups (swapchain resize drain, repeated surface comparisons) were closed by the contributor gate, and one remains open as an issue. Thread

How it got here

1. 26 Sep 2026A big compatibility PR is merged. Later work from the same author is held back after Dreaming Sarah initialisation and post-logo rendering regressions were reported. Source
2. 1 Oct 2026A shader change that blacked out the screen is reverted so the image is displayed again. Source
3. 2 Oct 2026Boot to gameplay on Windows (RTX 4080): the game now gets past unwind and debug-raise errors, finishes boot, loads 108 resources and opens a window with a Vulkan swapchain. Source
4. 4 Oct 2026Title menu still renders as on main after a graphics-targets change. Source
5. 9 Oct 2026Windows host-import texture fix: GTX 1050 Ti goes from 12 fps to 60 fps. Source
6. 10 Oct 2026File-descriptor limit raised on Linux so the game does not run out of file handles (it needs about 1,180). Source
7. 10 Oct 2026A graphics-queue reset change that made the game abort before the first frame is reverted; main runs it at 59.9 fps again. Source
8. 10 Oct 2026Windows 11 user with Ryzen 5 3600X + RTX 3070 reports about 58 fps average over 2 minutes. Source
9. 11 Oct 2026Windows user on RX 6700 XT reports gameplay at about 60 fps with an unmerged driver workaround. Source

Tested hardware