Dreamscape was not originally on my must-play list for BitSummit. After all, the game's DEMO had already launched on Steam late last year. The development team has been continuously fixing, updating, and adding new content. Having played for dozens of hours, I felt I had experienced Everythinggj worth tasting.
But when passing by the NEOWIZ booth, I couldn't resist sitting down to play a couple of rounds.
The fun of playing Dreamscape is evident within the first ten minutes. Its gameplay is built entirely on the mature creative foundations that roguelikes have developed over years of exploration. After Hades was released in 2018 to great success, 2.5D action roguelikes became increasingly popular among indie developers. Following interpretations by many different titles, action roguelikes now have a fairly mature creative paradigm, constantly emerging with new gameplay designs that bring fresh experiences.
Dreamscape is the latest link in this year's path of exploration. After releasing the game's DEMO late last year, it has been pursued by fans of this genre. The DEMO alone garnered participation from hundreds of thousands of players and thousands of positive reviews. From a gameplay perspective, Dreamscape's early success is not surprising, as all its highlights precisely hit the current preferences of players for action roguelike games.
Players of Dreamscape commented that they played for 50 hours just on the DEMO alone.
In the perception of many players, action roguelikes are often positioned as "satisfaction games." This satisfaction can be divided into several different layers.
The most intuitive aspect is visual feedback. Flashy effects, outstanding hit feedback, and excellent art style are highlights of Dreamscape. Building on a slightly Low Poly art design, Dreamscape adds as many detailed design elements as possible to characters and skills, especially sparing no effort on skill effects. The level of "light pollution" in the late game is quite characteristic of various roguelikes that focus on stacking effects.
Visual feedback is followed by operational feedback. Why is it inaccurate to judge the intensity of combat satisfaction in action games based solely on visual information when watching demos? The fundamental reason is that gaming is an art of interaction, and the player's active input is the most crucial part of this interaction. To present satisfying combat, action roguelikes often equip intense, fast-paced, and flashy combat sequences with dense and diverse command input patterns. This design of rapid input yielding rapid feedback is itself a source of satisfaction, forming the basis of enjoyment for many action games.
Dreamscape's design in this area is quite special. The game's description calls it an action roguelike fused with MOBA elements. However, if you play only with a controller, you might doubt this description. This is because the gameplay is no different from traditional action roguelikes. At most, you might feel that the game conveniently supports both "twin-stick shooter" and "single-stick aim assist" control modes.
However, when you switch to keyboard and mouse mode, you'll find the controls are the most MOBA-like aspect of the game. In addition to the traditional WASD movement with mouse and other keys for attacks and skills, the game offers a highly MOBA-style control scheme using the mouse for movement and attacks, with QWER for skills. The biggest difference between these two modes is that when the mouse is used for movement, players gain significantly improved precision and speed in character positioning. This allows for tighter integration between positioning changes and skill combos, delivering combat fun with a distinct MOBA flavor.
Of course, for action roguelike games, the most important satisfaction still comes from the building aspect inherent to the roguelike gameplay. From a play experience perspective, except for rare exceptions, roguelike gameplay tends to be quite repetitive. Randomness in levels and enemies doesn't significantly impact the core flow. What truly supports this replayability is the different character builds players create during each repetition.
This gameplay offers positive feedback on three different levels: the satisfaction of power from completing a build, the freshness of experiencing different builds, and the surprise of discovering unexpected synergies between enhancements. Good roguelike games typically need to provide sufficient design content across all three aspects.
What Dreamscape does best is offer freshness and possibility in builds. Interestingly, the underlying framework supporting this is actually a MOBA-style character design.
The development team, Lizard Smoothie, designed multiple distinct characters for the game. Each character has a unique role due to differences in passives and dodge mechanics—some lean towards fragile DPS, others towards heavy tanks, and some even act like healers. This approach to character design somewhat contradicts the conventions of previous action roguelikes. Defined roles imply specialization, whereas action roguelikes often require characters to be versatile enough to handle all situations. Distinct character roles tend to have more positive effects in games that emphasize teamwork.
But Lizard Smoothie employed a flexible strategy to accommodate the needs of both gameplay styles: four selectable skill slots, with each skill having three associated gem slots.
Although each character starts with two skills and one passive, aside from the passive, all four skill slots for each character can be customized. Even if you are a marksman, you can transform into a melee lancer through skill selection. It's just as easy for a character that looks like a healer to pull out a destructive beam from nowhere. This aligns well with the requirement for character versatility in roguelike games, allowing each character to have comprehensive development paths.
Meanwhile, since each character has unique mechanics composed of passives, talents, and dodge traits, players can choose two paths when playing each character: ignoring character traits to build around powerful skills, or growing around the character's specific traits. This equates to players making two layers of character build choices in the game: the first is choosing the character, and the second is selecting four skills from a library of dozens or even hundreds.
The most direct impact of these two layers of choice is that the already vast number of builds in roguelike games, made possible by the ability pool, is multiplied several times over by the existence of distinct characters.
But the possibilities offered by Dreamscape don't stop there—in fact, they go far beyond. This is because the three gem slots attached to each skill further alter the form of the skill itself.
The gems embedded in skills in the game often possess powerful mechanics that change how the skill itself is used. For example, they can add an extra instance of damage, change the skill's attribute to fit a certain build, reduce cooldown based on player actions, or even turn a healing skill into a damaging one.
This design combines skill editing mechanics akin to NOITA and Magic Craft with a Diablo-like skill slot system, greatly expanding the dimensions of build options available to players. Even if players choose the same skills during their run, different gem selections will cause those skills to function differently.
This adds another layer on top of the two character build dimensions mentioned earlier. Consequently, the number of potential builds players might encounter increases by another twelvefold.
If you simply summarize what makes Dreamscape stand out, you'll find it uses common phrases we often use to describe roguelike games, such as satisfying combat, rich builds, and high variability. But as roguelike games have evolved, their design has gradually formed templates. In this context, players have become accustomed to looking at more specific content volume, richness of design, and depth of exploratory possibilities.
And these are aspects that can only truly be distinguished through further in-game experience.
From the fact that Dreamscape attracted numerous players who logged dozens of hours just on the DEMO, gained support from hundreds of thousands of players, and maintained an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam, it is easy to judge that the game has unique strengths in these areas.
However, the viral success of indie games is rarely caused by a single factor. I was always curious about the reasons behind Dreamscape's surge in popularity among Chinese players based solely on its DEMO, and its potential to become this year's dark horse. After finishing my playthrough of Dreamscape, I was fortunate enough to meet Zhao Wei, General Manager of NEOWIZ China, the game's publisher, and conducted a brief interview with him.
In response to my question, he gave an answer very characteristic of a publisher. He believes the popularity of Dreamscape is built upon the large base of MOBA players in China, such as the massive player bases for League of Legends and Honor of Kings. For such a player group, the combination of MOBA and roguelike elements offers considerable freshness and appeal. He feels that the data showing the highest proportion of Chinese players on the Dreamscape wishlist supports this judgment.
Based on this judgment, NEOWIZ also adjusted its global publishing strategy for Dreamscape. While players worldwide generally have unified demands for games, cultural differences still lead to biased preferences. Zhao Wei believes that besides supporting the development team in making the gameplay sufficiently interesting, they also need to communicate differently with players in various regions and adjust the details of their publishing plans based on player feedback. Currently, they emphasize the roguelike attributes more in Europe and America, while in China, they highlight the importance of the MOBA concept.
In recent years, NEOWIZ has emerged as a notable new publisher in the game market. Beyond their traditional online game business, they found a new direction and have consistently brought us excellent titles such as Skul: The Hero Slayer, Shadow Trickster, and Lies of P. Their precise and unique eye for game selection has drawn attention from many players to the new moves of this old friend in the gaming industry. At this BitSummit exhibition, their showcased titles Dreamscape, Kill the Shadow, and Chasing the Light of Doom were also highly anticipated works.
Since I have always enjoyed titles published by NEOWIZ, I took the opportunity to ask some questions about NEOWIZ's development in the Chinese market.
Surprisingly, NEOWIZ places far greater emphasis on the Chinese player community and game market than I imagined. According to him, although Dreamscape currently has Simplified Chinese, they will continue to refine the Chinese text. Meanwhile, they are preparing to incorporate localized Chinese elements and symbols into the game, creating new scenes, skins, icons, and even storylines. This content will be completed after the game's launch and is currently under research.
In addition to prioritizing Chinese localization for Dreamscape, NEOWIZ is continuously building its domestic publishing team, planning to support more works from Chinese indie game studios. This work has been underway for some time. Among the titles NEOWIZ exhibited at this BitSummit event was Kill the Shadow, produced by a Chinese team.
Additionally, this veteran giant in the gaming industry has chosen an approach that is very important for indie games yet relatively scarce in China: Game Jams. They prepared an indie game development competition called NEOWIZ QUEST, targeting indie game developers globally, and collaborated with Hypergryph's Kaotuoxin (one of the most well-known Game Jam events in China) for promotion in China.
He believes that beyond establishing partnerships, publishers can assist independent game teams with funding and development support. This helps bring more outstanding developers to light.
At the end of the interview, Zhao Wei asked me to convey his apologies to players in China.
After releasing the DEMO late last year, Dreamscape not only impressed with its substantial content but also saw the development team continuously updating it. This serious attitude earned widespread praise among Chinese players. However, recently, they have significantly slowed down DEMO updates, nearly bringing them to a halt. This has left many current players stuck on older versions. Although this is because they need to focus on launching the full version, he still feels apologetic towards the players.
However, he promised that the full release of Dreamscape will feature more maps, heroes, and skills, with more surprises in store. He hopes players will provide more feedback, as the team strives to deliver a better final version.
