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.
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.
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.
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.
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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