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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | DLC & Pre-Order | Review |
ENA: Dream BBQ is a first-person adventure game based on a very popular animated series. Read on to learn everything we know, our review of the first chapter, and more.
Everything We Know About ENA: Dream BBQ
ENA: Dream BBQ Plot
ENA: Dream BBQ Chapter 1: The Lonely Door deals with the titular character’s quest to find the Boss. To do so, she must first get rid of the smoke hindering their progress by seeking a powerful genie from another world.
ENA: Dream BBQ Gameplay
ENA: Dream BBQ is a surreal adventure simulation game where players step into the role of ENA as she embarks on a quest to find the Boss everyone wants to be. Players will navigate surreal environments infused with early ’90s internet aesthetics and vivid colors, encounter a variety of eccentric characters, and utilize strange tools to their advantage—all while grappling with the peculiar reality of being the most unpopular person at the Dream BBQ.
ENA: Dream BBQ Release Date
ENA: Dream BBQ released for PC via Steam on March 27, 2025. According to the game's Steam page, it was released at midnight local time ET.
ENA: Dream BBQ Review (Chapter 1)
Swept Me Senseless
ENA is a wildly popular animated series created by Joel G, known for its surreal visuals, baffling humor, bizarre storytelling, and disjointed—yet strangely charming—writing. That said, I’m not particularly familiar with the series, having only watched a few episodes a couple of years ago. Still, I remember it feeling a lot like what you’d get if you gave a proper protagonist to the 1998 PlayStation game LSD: Dream Emulator.
If you remember that game, then you have my sincerest condolences—and my deepest respect.
Anyway, ENA: Dream BBQ throws you straight into an eerie road immediately after setting the volume and brightness. No main menu, no splash screens, no character introductions—just you and the game (and the massive floating thing above your head). For the first few minutes, you’re left to wander aimlessly before the game even acknowledges that you’re playing as Ena, the titular protagonist.
This complete lack of onboarding—even basic introductions—feels deliberate. ENA: Dream BBQ, like the series it’s based on, leans into surrealism as a form of entertainment, embracing the illogical, the bizarre, and the nonsensical. You’re not meant to understand it; you’re simply meant to experience it. How you interpret that experience is entirely up to you.
So how do you review a game that defies explanation? Simple: you just talk about what you encountered.
What the Ena Doing?
So, what do you actually do in ENA: Dream BBQ besides staring in confusion at the bizarre environment? Well, unless you’re keen on pressing ‘E’ to interact with literally everything around you, including NPCs that, for now, exist purely for flavor text, the core gameplay boils down to an uncanny adventure-platformer.
Basically, you run around doing errands for everyone until you get what you came for—all while trying not to plummet off the game’s many vertical drops.
It might not sound like the most thrilling experience, especially if you’re the type who dreads chores after already dealing with them in real life. (You do take care of your chores, right?) But there’s actually more nuance to ENA: Dream BBQ’s quests than it first seems.
That is, you’ll probably have no idea what you’re supposed to do 90% of the time. Questing in this game is just as much a mental puzzle as it is a physical, gamer™-oriented challenge. For example, getting a jar of mayonnaise might seem like a simple culinary achievement, but it’s actually a tactical one—it’s used to block someone’s line of sight. Not by smearing it in their eyes, mind you, but by placing the entire jar over their head.
An Audiovisual Feast for the Open Minded
The only thing the ENA series’ visuals have in common is their complete lack of anything in common. ENA: Dream BBQ continues the trend, throwing together PlayStation-era 3D models, modern 2D sprites, painting-like imagery, and unnervingly uncanny animations that remind me of Link: The Faces of Evil (because it’s funny). It’s a smorgasbord of elements that shouldn’t fit together—because they don’t. Honestly, it feels like a modern-day Picasso painting in video game form. But that’s part of the series’ charm.
And if the visuals feel like a dream barely holding itself together, the audio ensures you never settle in. The music jumps between multiple genres, each unsettling in its own way, often changing so abruptly that it feels like it's struggling with its own identity. The various NPCs don’t just talk, either—they often glitch out and mutter in distorted tongues, bouncing between comprehensible and incomprehensible languages, sometimes sounding human and, more often than not, otherwise.
Ena herself is a storm of contradictions. One moment, she’s speaking intelligibly through her red, "salesman" personality; the next, she breaks into heated outbursts with her pale yellow side, as if her previous professionalism was just a figment of your imagination. There are even times when she glitches out of the game’s reality entirely, her voice distorting as if her very existence is being corrupted.
The Less You Understand the Game, the More You’ll Enjoy It
If there’s one thing this game shares with its animations, it’s that it doesn’t give you time to chew your food. Instead, it wants you to keep swallowing, even if you’re already choking on information.
What information, you ask? Well, I’ll be honest: everything here is something to shove down your throat. From the confusing—yet oddly poetic and meaningful—humor, to the bizarre visuals that, as mentioned earlier, lack any cohesiveness, to Ena’s manic nature as she switches between calm and irrational personalities without any discernible pattern.
Trying to understand what’s happening at any point is, therefore, an exercise in futility. The best you can do is grasp at fragments of meaning buried within the seemingly random ramblings. But if you’re the type who enjoys surrealism, then there’s no doubt you’ll enjoy this game, even if it leaves you with a dozen questions and no answers by the time the credits roll.
Any other kind of game with this design would have resulted in a messy, incomprehensible, unplayable slop. But for ENA: Dream BBQ—a title designed to depict an almost poetic sense of madness—the confounding game design only serves to enhance the experience.
It’s Free, By the Way
The first episode of ENA: Dream BBQ is completely free—and so will every future episode unless some major change happens.
That’s right. You can experience this mind-melting adventure for the low, low price of zero dollars and zero cents. But if you feel like supporting the developers, there’s a Supporter Edition available for $9.99. It adds various collectibles that unlock animatics, concept art, in-development screenshots, etc. In other words, all completely optional content.
Oh, and a dog you can pet.
ENA: Dream BBQ is a game I wholeheartedly support, and even recommend paying for the Supporter Edition—but for all the reasons that would normally be wrong for a video game. Yet, that’s exactly what makes it special. It’s an experience unlike any other, and I can’t wait to see how it evolves when the second episode drops.
ENA: Dream BBQ Similar Games
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ENA: Dream BBQ Product Information
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| Title | ENA: DREAM BBQ |
|---|---|
| Release Date | March 27, 2025 |
| Developer | ENA Team |
| Publisher | Joel G |
| Supported Platforms | PC |
| Genre | Adventure, Simulation |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | TBD |
| Official Website | ENA: Dream BBQ Official Website |
