Dream Cycle is the first game I’ve played that puts a fresh spin on Blink, Dishonored’s widely imitated short-range teleport spell. Admittedly, it’s less about the ability in itself, than how it works with and against the game’s sporadically coherent terrain. In Dishonored, Blink is sort of headshots but for movement, snapping you between points with toe-curling specificity. It takes the stodge out of vertical exploration and edits plodding stealth into a series of catlike pounces. It plays that role in Dream Cycle, too, especially when combined with levitation and silenced SMGs. But it’s also, here, a means of spelunking through a world that doesn’t quite want to be explored.
If you’ve done any caving yourself, you’ll be familiar with the mingled temptation and dread when you spot another chamber through a gap you’re not sure you can fit through. A beautifully banded sandstone channel, screened by stalactites. A hint of crystal in the dark, or the seductive glimmer of running water. Can you find a way to that glimmer, and rather more importantly, can you make it out again? Dream Cycle is made up of horribly tantalising spaces like these. It’s a third- and first-person action-adventure based on Lovecraft’s own “dream cycle” stories, set in procedurally generated biomes that consist of small, ruined overworlds and a concluding, separately loaded dungeon. You play Morgan Carter (yes, as in Randolph) – a young mage who’s as handy with a sword or pistol as she is a bolt of lightning. She’s searching the Dreamlands for her friend Erin, one of many victims of a mysterious sleeping sickness.
The procedural generation is highly erratic at the time of writing, often smashing the game’s prefabbed structures together so ferociously that key doors and windows are buried. But you can generally Blink – sorry, “Shadow Step” to gain access, flowing through fist-sized holes into eerie aggregations of soil and stone. Can you make it out again? Sometimes, the answer is no. Dream Cycle is more forgiving about magic than Dishonored – use a spell, and you can regain the mana providing you don’t fire off another immediately – but it’s still possible to exhaust your mana vials and maroon yourself while tele-hopping around structures that evoke Cubism as much as they do European castles or Aztec temples.
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