A ‘spire-like’ deckbuilder card game where you take the part of a dreamer captured in some sort of surreal dreamscape in their recurring dreams, struggling to overcome their own issues to break out of the loop.
Story
You realize you’re dreaming. This is nothing like what you’re used to though. It feels more solid, and it seems like you have more agency, but this feels more like a nightmare. The things going on in your life must have affected you harder than you think…
In every game you start, you represent someone who has been captured in the pull of the nightmare realm due to some great injustice they have encountered (or done) in their waking life. Even worse, the elements of your injustice are bleeding into your dreams. The only way out is to interpret them and make a breakthrough in yourself.
Gameplay
Your Dreamer represents the character guiding to have a breakthrough. Before you start the game, you choose the aspects of their personality, which will affect how they interact with the nightmare realm. As with all dreams, the manifestations of these aspects tend towards the surreal.
As part of your quest for your personal breakthrough, you will be enountering enemies (called “Torments”) which are a mental manifestation of the things that caused your dreamer to be having these nightmares in the first place.
You short objective when facing a torment is to “interpret” it and therefore help you find meaning in your dreams. On the other hand, the torments you’re facing will be causing you stress, as aspects of your real life problems are bleeding into your dreams. Accumulate enough Anxiety, and your dreamer will wake up in cold-sweats, and you’ll have failed that run.
The game follows the typical gameplay of a deckbuilder. You draw 5 cards per turn, and you use them to deal with the current situation. Any cards you didn’t use will be discarded, and you’ll draw 5 new ones at the end of your turn. You will also have the capacity to draft new cards whenever you complete an Torments encounter.
Play
You can play directly on your browser or download local executables from itch.io.
If you find any bugs or have ideas for improvement, absolutely let me know through the issue tracker.
Be aware that the game is still in an extremely early release and it’s currently under constant work.
About
Slay the Spire and likewise games is one of my favourite genres to come out in recently years. Unfortunately a lot of these games suffer from an extendability problem. I.e. You cannot keep infinitely expanding the card pool, without diluting the effective strategies for each character/archetype. Monster Train had a great idea to mix more than 1 deck together and that increases the possibilities exponentially. I wanted to make a game which takes that approach to the next level
The second reason is that I want a deckbuilder with legacy elements that are more than just unlocking new cards. I wanted to include the possibility for permanent changes in the game and cards that are not effectively a simple power-creep on the behalf of the player. I also wanted this aspect to make thematic sense within the game context, and this lead me to the theme idea I’ve settled on.
Finally, spire-like deckbuilders are having as sort of renaissance and there’s a lot of great ones coming out on the bandwagon, as well as a lot of half-thought ones. However there’s none out there that are free software and belong to the commons in a way that they can get expanded for years or decades. This was something I wanted to fulfill.
Credits and Thanks
The game is only possible due to the amazing work that is the Godot Game Engine.
Tons of appreciation to the Slay The Spire developers who modified the deckbuilding archetype for single-player games in such a tight manner that they single-handedly spawned a whole subgenre of video games!
And finally a ton of thanks to everyone who releases assets into the commons and helps improve humanity as a whole. I only hope this little game of mine adds something worthwhile as well.
Social Links
We’re actively looking for all sorts of collaborators and playtesters. Join our discord or Matrix if you’d like to contribute or discuss.
You can also follow us on Mastodon.