The history of Dreamscaper follows a womanhood named Cassidy, who has just moved to the city of Redhaven. Every night when she sleeps, Cassidy awakens in a dream world that is teeming with monsters. It ‘s here that the player can uncover Cassidy ‘s memories and learn more about her past. Once she wakes up, she can explore the town and meet new people, and the player can help forge her future relationships. As the musician descends deeper into Cassidy ‘s dreams, they will learn the reservoir of her fears and why she has dungeon-shaped nightmares .
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Dreamscaper consists of two halves : exploring the dream populace and spend time in Redhaven. The dream populace is broken up into levels which consist of interconnected rooms. Cassidy needs to defeat all of the enemies in a room before she ‘s allowed to travel to the next one. There are besides special rooms that do n’t contain enemies, which alternatively include shops, upgrade stations, puzzle rooms, and treasure rooms. In order to progress to the following level, Cassidy needs to defeat the party boss of the floor. Once the boss has been defeated for the first time, it can be skipped on subsequent runs .
The gameplay of Dreamscaper is akin to that of Hades, with Cassidy collecting a growing arsenal of power-ups and weapons to take down enemies. She besides has access to block, dodge, and hedge moves, which can besides be upgraded. Dreamscaper has a fast-paced gameplay loop that rewards skill and precise timing, along with a willingness to shake up the player ‘s tactics mid-way through a operate in order to make the most out of fresh items. Like most procedurally render roguelikes, there is an element of luck to each run, and a dear excerpt of items and power-ups can make things easy. Dreamscaper gets more challenge with each floor, and the musician has the ability to up the difficulty before each run in substitute for better rewards .
once Cassidy inescapably loses a run, she wakes up back in the actual world. It ‘s here that the actor can spend the different currencies they have acquired in the pipe dream worldly concern in holy order to purchase new items that will appear during a run, permanent wave upgrades for Cassidy, and new room types for each stage. This gradual unlock of progress is what makes Dreamscaper indeed a lot fun, as Cassidy slowly becomes stronger with each run or will have more options when it comes to attacks. This means the musician is constantly tipping the odds in their favor, while never being guaranteed success .
Where Dreamscaper stumbles is with its story and characters. There are residents in Redhaven that Cassidy can interact with who work in a like fashion to the Confidants from Persona 5, and outgo clock with them will unlock buffs in the dream world. The trouble is that all of the residents of Redhaven are boring people with convention lives and problems. This is genuine of Cassidy herself in a lot of ways, as her real-life position is a stark contrast to the fast-paced carry through and bloodcurdling enemies that appear in the dream world. The contrast just does n’t work the direction it could, leading Redhaven to become a series of shops with excessively long-winded NPCs .
The visuals and soundtrack of Dreamscaper are besides a mix bag. The party boss designs are bang-up, but the regular enemies leave a draw to be desired, as they show a storm miss of imagination for living embodiments of nightmares. The rooms themselves are a mix of gorgeous nightmarescapes and boring streets & outdoor areas. The soundtrack is besides inconsistent in Dreamscaper, as some of the songs would n’t be imperfectly in a lo-fi ten-hour YouTube chocolate house mix, which does n’t match the excite battles that are happening on-screen .
Dreamscaper is a game of contrasts and not all of the elements are cohesive. It combines the incredible gameplay loops of Hades and Persona 5, but wraps them in a slice-of-life software that does n’t quite fit them in properly. unaccented characters and report aside, however, Dreamscaper is a great roguelike and worth checking out for fans of the music genre all the same .
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Dreamscaper is available now for Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam. Screen Rant was provided with a digital transcript of the Switch version for the purposes of this review .
Our Rating:
4 out of 5 ( Excellent )
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About The Author
Scott Baird
( 2212 Articles Published )
Scott has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016 and regularly contributes to The Gamer. He has previously written articles and video scripts for websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, and TopTenz. A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started out as a film scholar before moving into journalism. It turned out that wasting a childhood playing video games, reading amusing books, and watching movies could be used for finding employment, careless of what any career adviser might tell you. Scott specializes in gaming and has loved the medium since the early ‘ 90s when his first cabinet was a ZX Spectrum that used to take 40 minutes to load a plot from a tape cassette player to a black and white television plant. Scott now writes crippled reviews for Screen Rant and The Gamer, a well as news reports, opinion pieces, and game guides. He can be contacted on LinkedIn .
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