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

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.