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Shape of Dreams could be a certified classic (emphasis on “could”)
If “Hades but with friends” has always been your dream you’ll probably enjoy what you play. It’s difficult, and there’s never a moment of downtime, unless you have a friend who overthinks every upgrade choice, in which case, buckle up.
Image by Lizard Smoothie Character options are born of classic RPG classes but with distinct style. I enjoyed playing Aurena, a melee support class with a high skill cap, the “Expelled Sage of the Lunar Conclave of Arcanum”. She can temporarily sacrifice health to deal damage and heal allies.
Image by Lizard Smoothie With each map having five to ten stages of enemies, it can be difficult to know if you’re exploring enough before daring to fight each boss. After each stage, prepare to ready up and then remind your friend to get ready. In the beginning, the stages go by quickly and it feels like too much time not fighting but rather deciding where to travel next. Sometimes the stages have random features, for example, a well which allows you to spend dust (the game’s currency) to upgrade your abilities or gems (augments to your abilities), but both can feel underwhelming.
Image by Lizard Smoothie Completing each stage rewards you with an ability or gem for upgrading abilities. This part of the game really shines, and it’s fun to combine effects for an increasingly powerful and devastating blow, but often I feel like my best move is the power-up my class-provided abilities and it removes what could be interesting trade-offs. The nature of having every ability available for every class, and every upgrade available for every ability leaves me missing the exciting moments when you find the perfect upgrade which are far more memorable. Instead, I end up just upgrading one ability more than everything else, often the one included in my class from the start or a rare ability better than the rest, then spamming that with a few extra doo dads that barely do anything.
Image by Lizard Smoothie After beating the demo a second time, I spent my measly 60 stardust on a few breadcrumbs of upgrades, then looked further up the progression tree to see nothing enticing. Lizard Smoothie has something here, but it’s lacking. It needs better class based meta-progression, alternate starting abilities (a la Risk of Rain 2) and different ways to play the classes, and better boss design. The bosses are pretty good, the pace exciting, the difficulty’s well-tuned. But I worry that if Lizard Smoothie don’t include more variety, players will get bored quickly. I need something more than dodging red circles on the ground. I wonder how many players will die on the first boss as the difficulty ramps up compared to the trivial enemies before. Now I wonder how they will design bosses strong enough to make them feel engaged again.
Is Shape of Dreams good enough to carry its own weight on its own two feet? Good enough to wrestle away an audience from an increasingly competitive multiplayer roguelike market?
Good luck, Lizard Smoothie
And I mean that in the most genuine way possible.
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I won’t play mobile shooters
This is the link to the article.
Remember Diablo Immortal? Well, this game is made by the same people, so there’s that.
I don’t play mobile games very much unless they are games that can be played with one hand and paid little attention to while still maintaining a high level of skill at the game. I don’t want to be bad at something I’m playing with one hand. It’s a shooter though. Why would I play a shooter on my phone?
If you haven’t suffered through the experience of Diablo Immortal (or if you have), let me give you a brief overview of my problem with it.
This is the UI. It mostly resembles my experience, but imagine that the bottom left and right sides of this image are covered by thumbs, then think of trying to hit the tiny buttons above the big purple missile. I’m going to ignore the difference between the two ticks of 373 which are presumably damage and the boss’s health which has been whittled down to 159,884 despite the fact that the red in the background of the health bar which is presumably supposed to represent the overall percentage is consistent all the way across.
One response to “I won’t play mobile shooters”
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100% yes! Though many games have tried to make mobile equivalents they often come off as terrible ports to me. I have the most fun on my phone when playing NYT word games or Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Maybe one day they will come up with good controls for touchscreens for fps/moba etc but I haven’t seen it yet.
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Let’s stop pretending to be scared
Indie games are really only distributed in two ways now: Steam and itch, a relatively prominent indie game distribution platform that you may not have heard of. I say ‘relatively’ because while its commonly known in the world of indie games, it isn’t necessarily known outside of indie games as I’ve only ever heard a few mentions of it in the mainstream. I would compare its popularity to PICO-8, an incredibly fun and minimalist approach to gated indie distribution as well as game engine all within a compact packaged executable.
The pitch of itch (also commonly referred to as itch.io) is that anyone can upload anything provided that it isn’t blatantly illegal (copyright infringement, excessive gore, and illegal sex stuff).
Only 2 out of the 24 games put out today are not horror games.
Horror is an increasingly bloated genre on itch.io taking up increasingly more space as the platform grows in both popularity but also in the indie market and specifically a way for indie games to get exposure via offering free content in a packaged demo/mini experience on itch, then encouraging players to buy the complete game from Steam usually at a relatively low price between $5 and $20 depending on the scope and length of the game for the most part.
I have always believed that letting the indie game ‘market’ (for lack of a better term) sort itself out is the best option, but I’m starting to feel like people have figured out how to manipulate itch’s audience to get the most people to play their game. I’d have to go back and analyze the top sellers page, but horror games are filling more and more space on the top sellers page than ever. Other than itch’s curated list of featured games (aptly titled “Featured Games”), it is the one other place that itch users are led to if they don’t know where to go. It would make sense that an inexperienced user of itch would look to the most popular games on itch to see the type of games that represent the platform. But the issue is they don’t.
itch knows they aren’t the best that indies have to offer
This is not itch’s fault. They are simply hosting a page that displays to users the most popular games at that time and that makes sense to do so. itch is being let down by both its users and the developers who makes these games. It’s rare for the most popular games to coincide which the featured games. In another section itch curates, Fresh Games, the games are ranked by how often they are added to collections. Itch has never explicitly stated this, but I assume that it isn’t just a raw number of being added to collections because otherwise it would be easily manipulated. I imagine it has more to do with games that are added to collections that have a certain number of users or a specific type of user following them. Itch is by no means obligated to share exactly what process games go through to end up on the ‘Fresh Games’ list, but the games on the most popular list are almost never on the ‘featured’ games or ‘fresh’ games pages.
Why?
Itch knows that the YouTube bait jump scare horror games aren’t really worth playing.
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I miss the school library
In seventh grade, my friends and I would all congregate around one or two computers in the school library and fawn over whatever games were coming out next. This could have been GameSpot, GameTrailers, or another website I don’t remember, but they served a really important purpose: a social gathering place for like-minded people to enthuse about video games.
Trailers don’t need to be written about. They’re on YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram and those are the appropriate places for trailers to be shared and seen, but now we are inundated on things that we can already find on our own.
I don’t think there is a central location to find video game trailers anymore and gaming news sucks now. It’s either a guide, a trailer, a quote from a developer, or a fun fact about a game.
Tomorrow some guy is going to beat Elden Ring with a recorder that he made out of a piece of celery and nearly every outlet is going to write about it except for PCGamesN because PCGamesN sucks.
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