Dreamspring

The dev calls this 1.0, but I would say it needs another year in the oven. The level design is pretty amateurish - understandable, seeing as this game was made by an amateur, but understandable isn't the same as acceptable. Areas seem to follow three patterns: senseless maze, beach, and rubble-strewn field. Sometimes if the dev is feeling frisky he'll combine two of them. There is no real flow to the levels, nor does there seem to be any real thought on where enemies, items, etc. are placed. The most polite thing I can call the enemy design is uninspired. Palette swaps that deal more damage are the most exiting thing you'll find here. Melee enemies are a joke; at best they will manage to be an annoyance. Ranged enemies on the other hand, are far more aggressive, attack faster, deal more damage, and are actually capable of hitting a moving target from time to time. Ranged enemies with the zero-windup dash attack are AIDS incarnate and should just be avoided when you encounter them. Of the three bosses I've fought, two were melee, and thus a joke, and the third was trivialized by just standing slightly off-center on a platform so most of its attacks couldn't hit me, and shooting it with a gun. I don't know if I'm just blind or something, but I have only found two new weapons out in the world, and both of them are locked to the dream world. I've found plenty of spells, however. The starting gear is perfectly serviceable, but I got so tired of looking at the starting sword that I bought one of the two melee weapons for sale so I'd have something fresh to stare at. Speaking of melee weapons, both the player character's and enemies' melee range feels like it needs to be extended by around 50%. Either that, or make the slashing effect smaller. The game claims to be inspired by Morrowind and King's Field, but this game isn't anything at all like Morrowind (though it sure loves to reference it) and seems to take a lot more inspiration from Dark Souls than it does King's Field. The Morrowind references honestly borders on plagiarism at times; it's one thing to start your game with "Wake up, you were dreaming," but it's another thing entirely to have a 1:1 copy of Dagoth Ur, who has the same plan as Dagoth Ur, and quotes Dagoth Ur in a voice that sounds a bit like Dagoth Ur's. I'm fairly certain the game makes heavy use of pre-made assets, though there is only one assets that I know for a fact is premade - that weird worm thing from Starforge. I have no moral objection to pre-made assets, but using them tends to cause a issue present in this game: a non-cohesive visual design. The enemies and the ground that those enemies are standing on look like they are from two entirely different games. And on the topic of visual design - just ditch the VHS filter and weird pixel grid overlay. I know you can turn them off in the options, but it looks terrible and shouldn't be in the game to being with.

Came to this game expecting to get my King's Field fix. It utterly failed. It has none of that enticing level design you find in a Fieldlike; this is big, open areas with a lot of scattered enemies. That stairway? Deadend with plants. Those nooks and crannies? You guessed it, deadends with more alchemical ingredients. The combat is unsatisfying; your attacks feel limp and like they aren't connecting even when they are. The animations of the enemies are lacking; one time I wasn't even aware the enemy was winding up an attack. And one of the very first (common) enemies you fight is this super quick enemy that peppers you with ranged attacks, then flees as you near it. Which in turn has it retreat into other enemies you weren't aware about and aggroing them as well. Graphically the game feels uninspired, instead it leans heavily on the retro post-processing effects of CRT, VHS, etc. You turn those off and the game feels bland and generic. It is hard to describe but... everything feels like it was a haphazardly placed asset. It doesn't feel like it belongs where it is. If you want a clunky action first-person combat game, then you might like this. If you were looking to immersed in a rich, well-designed world, then look elsewhere.

I'm writing this as what I believe is my first review, and only after a highly disappointing end to my experience with this game. After thoroughly enjoying games like Lunacid and Dread Delusion that hit some of that retro vibe between Morrowind and early Fromsoft games, Dreamspring stood out as a game that has great potential and I'll still stand by that. For reference my entire playthrough of the game was on a Steam Deck, in case this help any other deck users before making a purchase. The game starts off and had me interested right away with the first area, but the framerate wasn't fantastic from the beginning. There are no quest markers to be found in the game which wasn't a big deal to me, but finding some of the areas in the game definitely felt like a chore at times, but the main areas of the game weren't as hard to find. There were some hidden rooms that were hard to find due to the texture design and an otherwise dimly lit area. Combat felt satisfying but could be a little unforgiving sometimes, particularly with ranged enemies but it gets better over time as you learn the game mechanics. There was a good variety of weapon types and all of them felt like they were worth investing level up points into. The lack of quest markers started to become an issue for me primarily with side quests, in part to due some areas being difficult to discover. I spent a lot of time just wandering around the game world to try and discover locations, most of which can be fast travelled back to after the fact. I found a few areas that didn't seem to have much purpose and had locked doors that even after beating the game once I never found a way into. I'm also sure I missed out on several hidden areas in the game even after a lot of exploring. Needless to say this isn't a bad thing, but in a lot of the areas in the game there are noticeable frame drops for the entire area, I didn't have a frame counter on but it looked like less than 20fps was very common and from what I've read on this review page, may be an issue outside of the Steam Deck as well. Despite some confusion trying to navigate this game world and attempting to discover places, my hours of wandering paid off by being able to fairly quickly push through the final few portions of the quest path I chose and that was a good feeling. I spent quite some time grinding just to level up and upgrade my equipment along the way as the system is similar to Lunacid to those who have played it, and as such I was invested in the equipment I was using. I then pushed on to what I found to be one of the endings of the game and was pleased to find out that after beating the game it "reverts" your save to a point where you aren't locked out from any questlines and carries any progress you made towards levelling and equipment to that point, and I was a big fan of this. Why then do I not recommend the game? I was able to overlook performance issues as I really did enjoy the game world, but upon updating to the 1.0 build it wiped my save data, with almost all the playtime on my record being from that save. The one thing I simply cannot overlook is losing all the progress I made in the game, as it completely killed my experience with the game. If a game update poses the risk of wiping someone's save data then a game is not worth playing, as your time is not respected. tl;dr Shoddy performance and low frames throughout the game and an update deleting save data plague what could have otherwise been a fantastic indie game. Edit: I want to further add that I reached out to the developer on their Discord, and after trying to be polite about the problem I was removed from their channel. If a developer would rather ban people from their Discord than deal with ruining people's save data then they aren't a good developer.