[News] Dream Cycle Review – Dream Bigger

[SaLaH.]

The impossibility of dreams is what makes them so paradoxically memorable and hard to grasp after the fact. We’ve all had dreams where we’ve been somewhere familiar, only to awake and realize with a small level of concern that the familiar place in our dream was not one of our waking levels. What we believe is our home might be a strange, impossible castle when looked back with conscious eyes. What was our family member might be a stranger or character or something entirely inhuman.

These strange inconsistencies are one of the things that make so dreams alluring to explore in media and fiction. And Dream Cycle manages to grasp this strange, uncertain, incomprehensible familiarity in the dreamscape, but not entirely necessary.

Inspired by Lovecraft and not Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (because we’re going for cosmic horror, not pure weirdness), Dream Cycle lets you take the mantle of a mage searching for a friend lost in their dreams. Which really does sound like Sandman. But the characters in graphic novels and the Netflix series rarely have sniper rifles, so it's not to pin down any true inspiration.

 

In fact, it's hard to pin down anything much about Dream Cycle. Combat is unmoored from the terrain as you float and fly between jagged towers and endless depths to remove the nightmares. The world itself is fractured almost beyond recognition, an accidentally beautiful quirk of an over-ambitious procedural generation program. And the narrative is fragmented and retracing to the point where it feels impossible to tell what era the game is meant to be set in.

Everything bleeds into each other, none of it fitting together quite the way it should. And maybe that's the point? Though, more likely, it is a quirk of the systems used to make it. Combat is fun, mostly. Minions teleport around the map as you do, forcing you to utilize the strange space as much as possible, as well as all your tools of destruction. Some weapons are more useful than others because each fight is so sprawling and shifting. You’re rarely going to be close enough to be effective with the shotgun or far enough away to take advantage of the sniper rifle. Instead, you’ll be using your spells and mid-range murder devices to exact death onto the nightmares of the Dreamlands.

But then there are the bosses. Normally, these are huge, hulking, fleshing monsters that look like they don’t fit into the randomized geometry of the map. Because they don’t. Thanks to the randomized nature of Dream Cycle, the bosses often just don’t fit. If Dream Cycle were an actual dream, the dimensions of the game and character would shift and reform until everything fit and didn’t fit at the same time. Because it's not, it just means that bosses instead become harmless bullet sponges as opposed to any kind of threat.

Source:https://wccftech.com/review/dream-cycle-dream-bigger/