Shape of Dreams' demo shows off an ingenious roguelike that wields Risk of Rain-tier finesse with action MOBA chaos, and I think I might be in love

pcgamer.com:

I'm a little staggered that I hadn't heard of Shape of Dreams before—while it has updated and promoted its demo for Next Fest, it's actually had a «prologue» available for a while, which has essentially been a sort of open alpha test for its devs. Click on that link, and you'll find that while its reviews are nice and humble—around 3,700—almost everyone who played this thing last year (95% of them, to be precise) liked it. Well, I've played the new Next Fest demo, and wouldn't you know, I like it, too.

Shape of Dreams is a co-op roguelike with action MOBA controls, a batch of word salad I would usually roll my eyes at—in fact, I sort of did, saying out loud to myself 'that's a lot of nouns' when it greeted my Steam client this morning. It's more simply described as Risk of Rain, but make it Battlerite. Which, given my love for both games, feels somehow targeted at me.

This isn't the first time someone's used an action MOBA/ARPG template for a roguelike, mind. Ravenswatch is another game I'm very fond of, for example—and well worth the recommendation that I'm tucking into this article. But what impresses me about Shape of Dreams is how thoroughly off the training wheels are—it's a game that's eager to let you get weird.

It occurred to me that Shape of Dreams was cooking with gas the moment I got to a shop and realised: 'hang on a minute, I can just sell half of my starting abilities?' See, in contrast to a game like Risk of Rain, each character in Shape of Dreams doesn't actually start with a full kit.

You might spy an ultimate and a couple of active abilities, but the truth is, the only immutable part of your character is their Identity Memory—essentially their basic attack—and the way in which their dash works. Every run, as a result, is an act of designing your own ad-hoc MOBA hero—but there's more going on here.

Each of these abilities (called «Traveler Memories» in game) can hold up to three essences, which modify them further. These can range from giving you an