Sin enjoyed the roguelike stylings of Dungeons of Blood and Dream when she played it in early access back in July, calling it a “baffling, bizarre thing that lives on the border of janky, retro, and punk”. As of yesterday, it’s now out for realsies, promising psychedelic dungeon crawling, the stabbing of assorted gribblies, and lots of little details that make you go “ooo, that’s nice. I’m glad they put that in there.”
The idea here is basically a stylistic extrapolation of that one font that’s incredibly boring on every metal band t-shirt printed in the last five years but interesting in terms of games doing fun wizardcore things. In brief, it’s a first-person dungeon crawler filled with treasure, secrets, and fleshy oddities with painstakingly modeled butts attempting to stop you acquiring said treasures and secrets. But it stands out by taking basic genre tropes and asking them pointed questions, possibly with pointed objects. What if your spells cost health to cast? What if your magic rings had different effects depending on which finger you wear them on? What if – and hear me out here – bird?
Here’s the setup, via Steam:
Following a horrific incident, Blood Wizard ends up trapped within the Mind Prison of a dangerous entity. With his powers crippled, he is forced to resort to fickle and unreliable sleep magic to attempt his escape. To earn freedom, he must fight his way through perilous dungeons of Dream, seek advice from mysterious locals and discover secrets.
Players on Steam seem to be enjoying it, although Sin did find a little too punishing, and that’s partly down to the rogue-lyness of it all. Each run is randomly generated, but there is meta progression between runs. I said I liked meta-progression paired with permadeath in a piece the other day, and at least one valued RPS commenter was wrong at me (expressed a different opinion) about it. Please, do sound off. You have my permission to be as wrong as you like.