I was quite taken with MOBA-style action roguelike Shape of Dreams when it dropped a demo during the first Steam Next Fest of the year, and it seems a lot of other people are also loving it now that it's out. Within 24 hours of its Steam launch on September 10, publisher Neowiz, which you may know from the Belle Époque Soulslike Lies of P, says Shape of Dreams sold over 100,000 copies.
Shape of Dreams is essentially a PvE MOBA infused with the randomness and chaos of Risk of Rain. We spoke to the co-founder of developer Lizard Smoothie earlier this year to ask about the vision for the game, and it was basically described as a bunch of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm nerds getting together and making the roguelike of their dreams. Amusingly, the studio's origin story is very close to Risk of Rain developer Hopoo's: two college students bashing a game together and getting carried away.
When I played it, Shape of Dreams scratched that itch of crafting absurd builds that tear through screens of enemies, and even as a MOBA avoider, I found myself loving the combat within minutes. You can play it up with up to four players, with eight highly customizable heroes to choose from, and I'm looking forward to jumping in with a buddy.
100,000 copies sold in one day is the first in a line of impressive stats from the game's launch. Shape of Dreams is the first game from Lizard Smoothie, but has managed a solid concurrent player peak of 45,773, according to SteamDB. At the time of writing, it's amassed 4,147 user reviews averaging 82% positive on Steam. When I checked the Steam stop sellers on Monday, it was sitting comfortably at seventh place.
Shape of Dreams arrived at an extremely competitive time for games. Its September 10 launch came less than a week after Hollow Knight: Silksong, which famously caused multiple developers to shift their release dates away from the Skong impact radius. We then had Borderlands 4 early access on PC on September 11. In the roguelike space, we got word on September 12 that Hades 2 will leave early access on September 25.
By any metric, Shape of Dreams had rough waters ahead of it, but it's cruised right through them. A new patch, update 1.0.5, was released for the game earlier today, seemingly beefing up a few things in players' favor while sanding down some bugs and translation errors.
The game is on sale for a limited time, down to $20 from $25 until September 24. The demo is still available, too, if you'd like to try it yourself. I've finally finished Silksong, so I might be splitting my time between Shape of Dreams and Borderlands 4 for a few weeks.
Word Play is a spelling roguelike that feels like the final boss of Wordle and it made me feel like an angry genius.
