From battling literal nightmares, and forging friendships in the waking world, Dreamscapes has a lot to offer for roguelike fans.
Freedom Games brought a great show to E3 2021 for fans of indie games and Dreamscaper is one of my favorites from their show. I had the pleasure to sit with the game’s developers from Afterburner Studios to talk about the game.
Dreamscaper is being developed by a team of four AAA development veterans: Ian Cofino on design and animation, Robert Taylor on engineering, Paul Svoboda on environment and characters and Dale North on music.
We left AAA game development so we could build our dream game: fluid modernized combat ⚔️ + rogue-lite exploration 🗺️ + relationship building 👋
The result is Dreamscaper. Available now on Steam: https://t.co/FOmJag6AoA
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— Dreamscaper – Aug 5th ➡️ Switch & PC (@DreamscaperGame) August 14, 2020
I’m not going to lie. At one point, the developers asked me if I enjoyed the roguelike games Binding of Isaac and Hades. If I were holding a pencil, I would have dropped it. Roguelikes have been my jam over the last couple of years, with Binding of Isaac being my most played and Hades coming in second mostly because I didn’t buy it until the end of 2020.
Developers said they drew heavy inspiration from both games as well as some of the dungeon-crawling aspects from The Legend of Zelda, creating an ARPG-Roguelike experience.
In Dreamscaper, players will take on the role of Cassidy in an effort to uncover her past. You will dive in her subconscious each night to take on her surreal nightmares which open up as dungeons each night in an effort to dispel the darkness in her mind.
The game features a waking world, where Cassidy talks with NPCs to weave together a beautiful narrative. In this world, you’ll explore in an effort to level up the powers and basic stats that affect gameplay in her dreams. There are unique resources and currencies that you acquire as you venture through her lost memories and dreams.
Wake from Cassidy’s nightmares to forge friendships and give Cassidy hope the darkness will eventually be dispelled from her mind. The more you invest in your friends, the more your friends will support you. In turn, this can unlock story vignettes and new powers to be used in your dreams; facing off against Cassidy’s most negative emotions turned into bosses with representations of fear, isolation, loss, negativity and more.
Developers created a rich combat system that rewards skilled play across a variety of weapon classes that require quick reactions, exact timing and care positioning to defeat a wide variety of enemies with their own unique set of skills.
Make your nightmare your source of strength by using lucid powers to bend the dreamscape around you, manipulate the elements to set enemies ablaze or freeze them in place or control time itself. Use your wits to solve puzzles and grow your strength, wandering through dreams to find resources and gear to build your own complimentary playstyle.
There are special modifiers and rare keepsakes that add depth and variety to gameplay. Developers said this allows players to create unique character builds that create unique synergies.
The dreaming world features procedurally generated maps, enemy layouts, items and rewards that will be different in every dream, and these nightmares feature a lot of optional puzzles that can provide great rewards.
In the dreaming world, you will have an attack scheme very similar to the one in Hades: A primary attack, secondary attack, block and parry as well as two lucid attacks. Lucid attacks come from the developer’s version of a magic system that have cooldowns. The lucid system brings a high fantasy vibe to the game that juxtaposes nicely with the realities of the waking world, bringing attacks into the game like summoning a giant frying pan to fry up nightmares or drop a meteor on enemies from the heavens.
It’s not all combat in the dreaming world, however. Developers said there is a lot of exploration to be done in nightmares and memories, having players attempt to understand Cassidy’s connection to these places. You will be in her subconscious working through her thoughts, issues and past traumas that manifest into these nightmares.
Dreamscaper launched into early access on PC last year and will fully launch on August 12 on both PC and Nintendo Switch.
