You can’t help but immediately relate to Dreamscaper, a game where the protagonist would rather spend her days dreaming than coping with life. Most of her time is spent in her bedroom, although she occasionally heads to a bar, the park, or a cafe to burn the hours away before her next dive into the dreamscape. It’s how a lot of people spent their time during the pandemic: wake, work, dream (play games, watch movies, choose your dream poison), sleep, repeat. That’s how it’s been the past year, and that’s what life is like for Cassidy.
From the minute the title screen appeared, backed by a gorgeous, soaring orchestral soundtrack, I knew I’d found something special with Dreamscaper. It’s a gem of a game.
First Impressions is a new column at TheGamer where I play a game for 30-ish minutes and jot down what I think about it. Unfortunately, I played Dreamscaper for almost two hours. Please forgive me.
Dreamscaper opens with our faceless protagonist standing in a flooded town near a misshapen house, her memory of the place twisted out of recognition. You step through a portal and reappear near a warped church and a graveyard. One of the tombstones glows with light - you walk up to it and a clawed hand reaches out from the mire. You wake up in your room.
Cassidy is young here. She’s on her knees by her bed and she’s staring at a family photo. Elsewhere in her room, there’s a framed message that simply says, “Cancer sucks.” Time flashes forward to ten years later and you see the family car leaving the sleepy town of Blackhill, presumably in an attempt to escape the bad memories, heading for the big city. Cassidy takes her memories with her anyway.
After this short introductory sequence, you’re offered a tutorial. Cassidy is playing a dungeon crawler and the camera shifts to the television set before zooming into the game. Combat is relatively straightforward. There are no combos to remember - just a light attack, a heavy attack, ranged attacks, spells, dodging, guarding, and parrying. It’s a game about timing. Time your light attacks right for a damage boost, time your blocks to parry and stun - or to knock projectiles back at ranged enemies - and time your dodge to briefly slow time. Your heavy attack can also knock enemies into walls to stun them, so you need to take positioning into account.
You start off with a baseball bat, which hits with a satisfying clang. But this being a roguelite, each run is different. There are daggers, swords, magical fists, and guitars that rip enemies like power chords. There are bows and water balloons, elemental spells, and loads more I haven’t yet seen. There’s a real sense of feedback for each.
When you’re in the Dream World, death is the end - you’re thrown back to the Waking World, and the dreamscape will only remember which bosses you’ve killed. When you head back into a dream, you’re free to skip over bosses that you’ve beaten, but that means you’ll also miss out on any resources they drop, and they drop a lot. You might be short of a weapon, armour piece, or item that will help you in the next area. You also might not have enough currency when you inevitably stumble across a shop. On top of that, there are items you can find in the Dream World that unlock options in the Waking World. For example, I found a guitar in a dream, which allowed me to spend resources while awake to unlock it for future runs.
While awake, you’re free to explore the town of Red Haven - here you can sit at a boozer to daydream and unlock buff rooms in the Dream World. You can also meditate at the park to increase total health, mana, or damage dealt against bosses, or you can sketch at the cafe to remember weapons. Each weapon you use also comes with a random modifier, such as wisps that encircle you and damage the enemy, gusts of wind that push enemies back, or bolts of energy that fire out in a cone. This random element ensures no two runs feel the same.
Dreamscaper might not have a million lines of dialogue like Hades, but its combat system is much more considered. Cassidy is coming to terms with trauma, and navigating grief, and it’s important to keep your shield up when trudging through those murky waters. It’s a game where feeling isolated in a city of clamour is harmoniously weaved through the story and mechanics. There’s a melancholic quality to Dreamscaper, an underlying sadness, but there’s something else, too: hope. If you confront your issues, things do get easier. That brick wall will eventually crack, and one day you’ll be able to walk through the gap like it was always there. Today you might be stuck in a cycle, but who knows what lies ahead - I’ll find out when I inevitably put 100 more hours into this brilliant game.