Dream Cycle is the first game I’ve played to refresh Blink, the short-range teleportation spell widely imitated by Dishonored. Granted, it’s less about the ability itself than how it works with and against the game’s sporadic coherent terrain. In Dishonored, Blink is a headshot but for movement, capturing you between points with the peculiarity of toe curls. It takes the standard out of vertical exploration and edits slow stealth into a series of cat-like raids. It also plays this role in Dream Cycle, especially when combined with Suspension and Noise Cancelling SMGs. But here, it’s also a way of exploring a world that doesn’t want to be explored.
If you’ve ever done any caving yourself, you’re familiar with the mix of temptations and fears as you discover another room through a gap you’re not sure you’ll ever get through. A beautiful banded sandstone passage, screened by stalactites. A gleam of crystal in the dark, or the seductive shimmer of running water. Can you find a way to that shimmer? More importantly, can you succeed again? Dream Cycle is made up of these terrifyingly inviting spaces. It’s a third- and first-person action-adventure game based on Lovecraft’s own “dream loop” story, set in procedurally generated biomes consisting of small, destroyed worlds and a The ending, individually loaded dungeon composition. You play as Morgan Carter (yes, like in Randolph) – a young mage who is as handy as a bolt of lightning with a sword or pistol. She is dreaming to find her friend Irene, one of many victims of a mysterious sleeping sickness.
As of this writing, the procedural generation is very unstable, often piecing together the game’s prefab structures to the point where key doors and windows are buried. But you can usually blink—sorry, “Shadow Step” in, flowing through fist-sized holes and into weird aggregates of soil and stone. Can you get it out again? Sometimes, the answer is no. Dream Cycle is more forgiving of magic than Dishonored – use a spell and if you don’t fire another spell right away, you can regain your mana – but it’s still possible to drain your mana bottle and evoke your structures around ranged jumps Turn yourself into brown cubism as much as a European castle or Aztec temple.
This may not sound very interesting, in fact, I can’t recommend Dream Cycle’s status quo. Version 1.0 of the game seemed to be more about financial necessity than integrity, with bugs in it that would cause you to leave the map or freeze controls. Technical issues aside, I’m not overly excited about its campaign pacing, which replays higher tier gear with more/stronger enemies, keys to new areas, and further Morgan’s quest for Erin’s memory fragments. But Dream Cycle’s frantic and unbalanced playspace is more intriguing than many full virtual worlds I’ve explored – and unlike the relatively chaotic Underworld: Ascendant, its movement system is so satisfying that you really want to To dig deeper.
Dream Cycle is the work of a small team led by Toby Gard, and it’s a transformative dialogue with Gard’s most famous game existence: 1996’s original Tomb Raider. When I think of 26 years of Tomb Raider, I think of a time when roaming 3D environments was overwhelmingly an alien, experimental, clunky pursuit, and the need for precision was born. Today’s third-person blockbuster gives you peace of mind, where you have to count every jump and measure every footstep. No face protection automatic mantle, no semi-automatic camera to aim you at the next platform, no checkpoints, no graded analog inputs, no illuminated waypoints or breadcrumb trails. You find the route and hit all the buttons with perfect timing or you’re dead.
Rather than making Tomb Raider “obsolete,” additions and tweaks to games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Assassin’s Creed, and Tomb Raider actually just made the old games more alien, More exciting and more important. Lacking the user-friendly features that are now accustomed, its ruins and caves feel more like ruins and caves—products of inhuman and unrelenting erosion and tectonic forces, whatever their resemblance to human-designed buildings. The world may be solvable, but it will never adapt. There is a pervasive incompatibility between the player and the sim that will only intensify as the genre evolves: it’s not just the ongoing prospect that Lara will meet a tricky ending, but a kind of environment’s impact on the player Didn’t like the disgust there at all.
As Gard explained elsewhere, Dream Cycle is an attempt to build a modern action-adventure game on a budget, using procgen to do some of the heavy lifting. But it often feels like an attempt to reconcile the foolproof traversal of Tomb Raider’s slick successor with the shock of rediscovering Tomb Raider’s relatively unacceptable world. On the one hand, Morgan was to the Lara Croft of the ’90s what Naruto was to a vacuum cleaner: she could glide, sprint and perform super-powered ledge vaults, better at beating the bewildering outcroppings of melee, ranged, and magical opponents. She can swarm outside the tower in seconds before you plug in (for example) the perk for extended glide time, and you’ll definitely never get a tower like this in a classic Tomb Raider. But Dream Cycle’s erroneous landscapes share the same stubborn, unfamiliar vibe as Gard’s reputation-making creations, their dark materials compressed into buildings that are less welcoming of your intervention, and all the more mesmerizing as a result.
I’m talking about “compression”, but buildings are often more like body cells captured during the replication process. I’m not sure if I’ve ever climbed full stairs in Dream Cycle: they’re always trying to free themselves from other stairs. I have an album of screenshots full of arches that lead into kaleidoscopic snake pits of other arches. The interior or exterior fixtures aren’t always clear: I found lively vegetable racks mounted on the icy exterior walls, and columnar thrones facing the ditch. Elsewhere, waterfalls spill out of the open air, and hammered planks create disjointed paths around twin columns of pumice. I can understand the logic behind these planks, their spacing allows Morgan, who has no mana, to level up by jumping and jumping. But I can’t explain a roof with a roof, or a railing that bites together like angry teeth.
The beauty of these spaces is that they don’t fit me. They certainly weren’t made for the convenience of Morgan’s enemies – some were found grumpy around campfires wedged at 45 degrees, others huddled like psyllids under massive hovering foundations. No wonder they attacked her as soon as they saw her: you wouldn’t feel very hospitable if you had to live in a painting of a drunk by Pablo Picasso. Dungeon bosses, spawned by poking ominous things like golden statues, and worst of all: some as big as houses, almost trapping themselves in geography once they try anything fancy like walking towards you.
Of course, another way to justify Dream Cycle’s quirky procgen is that it’s another Lovecraft story about the n-dimensional horror lurking beyond the twitching bedroom curtains of human consciousness. The dream world is supposed to be incomprehensible, and then, despite the tradition of Lovecraft adaptations, it balances the haunting prospect of “Impossible Geometry” with the all-too-familiar monster design, exaggerated exposition (you will Discover three-page excerpts from stories like The White Ship) and a basic cheesy (Morgan is given a spicy note of talking to himself).
Some of the topographic inconsistencies are well thought out: like in Control and Return, you’ll stumble upon objects from far-flung times and places, like TVs and phone booths, that tie into the inevitable wider conspiracy surrounding Erin’s disappearance. (Other anachronistic levels can be used as drop zones for more delicious weapons, like lightning pendants or sniper rifles.) The game also lets you guess the time of day. In some areas, the invisible sun slid across the sky momentarily, flashing over vegetation like a searchlight—an echo of the immense influence of Lovecraft, the frontier home of William Hope Hodgson. But I think the allure and menace of procedural terrain is greater than any nod to Cthulhu and the like, because the more Lovecraft’s own cosmic landscape is associated with various big-name squid-faced monsters, the less so repressed. Dream Cycle’s environment, unlike old-time plans, feels like a symptom of violent creativity that just accidentally makes room for players.
Given that Dream Cycle is still largely an Early Access game, I can imagine several directions for updates other than the name. On the one hand, with more QA, this could be a solid mage combat sim – a freeform, aerial-minded combatant riding the tail of Spellbreak’s coat to steal Forspoken’s thunder. Controls are well thought out, with ability to choose and execute by holding and releasing the controller bumper, and the spells have real drama, from the delightfully massive arcing fireball to the screen-whitening kamehameha beam.
The enemy isn’t always a sitting duck either. While geometry hopelessly ruins them, their saving grace is that they can also teleport, disintegrate, and reappear like a shuffle set by Death Eaters. It’s more for viewing than utility, but it’s another incentive for you to grab some airtime instead of hanging from the back with a longbow or wading through the water with a shotgun. Non-magical melee and ranged combat is less fascinating – enemy weak points can be knocked down instantly, but random swinging and dodging will usually do the job just as quickly, especially if your target is stuck on a table.
Building on all of this and taming procgen would be the safer path to Dream Cycle as far as Steam reviews go. Still, I’d prefer to play an updated version that actively enhances the weirdness of the terrain algorithm – a game focused on less kills and grinds and more gliding, blinking and jumping through weirder and less pliable masonry combinations and geology. Can you get it out again? We often rate procedural generation systems based on whether they are reminiscent of something “handcrafted”. I think this ignores the thrill and lingering unease of navigating a space too busy following its own rules, without regard for players trapped in hierarchies.
