Get Dreamscaper on Steam ➜ https://playnow.tm/dreamscaper/356
Disclosure – This game copy was bought by the reviewer.
Beautiful environments, decent music, and some semi-interesting ideas with the involvement of relationship building to unlock new spells/equipment drops. The game offers a room by room hack’n’slash with the focus being on finding new equipment to survive the small amount of enemies and bosses occupying them. Some puzzle rooms exist with minesweeper and line connections being what I have experienced thus far. Shops allow buying certain items and spells with the essence dropped from enemies, and the option to craft items before going into a new run is an option with the resources used to craft relationship boosting items. It is a bog-standard roguelike with the selling point being the environments/visuals.
It is a mixed bag in terms of the balancing right now with the RNG aspect on item quality and the enemy strength resulting in a spam fest with the standard attack (easily overpowered by the spells you acquired, making kiting and spell spamming a more viable option). The amount of enemies in each room also lends to this, making it feel underwhelming when you are just bound to fight 1-3 enemies at a time instead of mixing it up with 5-7 smaller enemies or focusing on more trap filled rooms. Keys and bomb drops can also lead to some scenarios where you will be unable to access rooms due to drop rates on both items. On the relationship front, it is serviceable with dialog offered on certain level ups being uninteresting, but that might change as you progress higher and get deeper into the person’s history.
Controls can be annoying if you are using mouse and keyboard. It is possible to find yourself stuck on a piece of scenery when trying to dodge because of the direction your facing and the same with accidentally being forced toward another enemy because of the attack combo pushing you in a certain direction. Shift+Click for ranged also feels awkward, but the option to rebind keys makes it easier to side-step the issue. It isn’t a deal-breaker, just a minor inconvenience and why I can see they recommend using a controller.
I hope to have the curate out by the end of the weekend, but I can see it being at least a mild recommendation based on the flow of gameplay and the two boss fights I encountered. I would need to see how easy it is later on to compare the price before being final.