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We've had two Steam Next Fest events this year, and among the dozens of demos that I've tried between them, one is still firmly stuck in my mind: Shape of Dreams, a MOBA-inspired roguelike that dominated the February Steam event. The demo is still available for download on Steam. Of all the announced roguelikes that we're still waiting on, I think this one is at the top of my to-do list.
Made by a small team of young devs in South Korea at developer Lizard Smoothie, under Lies of P studio and publisher Neowiz, Shape of Dreams is following in the footsteps of Risk of Rain, one of its biggest inspirations, with almost shocking accuracy.
Risk of Rain, and especially Risk of Rain 2, are among the favorite roguelikes of studio CEO Eunseop Shim, who spoke with GamesRadar+ (partially via interpreter). He and studio director Kipyo Kang are both computer science university students, and if that sounds familiar, it might be because the original Risk of Rain was made by Paul Morse and Duncan Drummond when they were still in college (they now work at Valve). I spoke to Morse and Drummond many times throughout their career, and it's remarkable how similar Shim's story sounds.
What's in a roguelike
Shim and the Lizard Smoothie were blown away by the Steam Next Fest demo's reception. Shape of Dreams has been in the works since early 2023, and its team has grown to a larger handful of devs thanks to the addition of a few artists who've defined the game's look. "We were both coding nerds making games that we like to play," Shim says of the primordial days, back when he and Kang struggled with making the game look as good as it feels.
In their origins and in their mechanics, Risk of Rain and Shape of Dreams feel cut from the same cloth. But where Risk of Rain was a 2D side-scroller and Risk of Rain 2 was a 3D third-person shooter, Shape of Dreams brings the isometric 3D action of MOBAs like League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm to the co-op roguelike framework. You choose a character, build your play style, upgrade and customize attacks and abilities, and stack passive bonuses and items to make the ultimate monster killer, cleaving through screens of creeps and imposing bosses. You can further accentuate a build through stat trees that help fill out the game's meta progression. It ends up with a bit of a Diablo feel, but that was a happy accident, as Shim says he's not very familiar with Diablo.
From the get-go, Shim makes it clear that Shape of Dreams is made to be broken, with the devs actively encouraging game-changing build synergies. It's music to my ears. There are enough limiters to keep the game challenging and to keep progression satisfying over many, many runs, but "our design philosophy would be, well, it's a PvE game, so whatever they want to do, we're just gonna let them do it."
At one point, the team experimented with user feedback and decoupled several classes and abilities, and it turned out to be so fun that it's become the new baseline. This freeform chaos only ramps up in co-op when you start combining abilities across characters and builds for, essentially, PvE team fights. But instead of landing pentakills, you'll be decimating roughly a zillion enemies at once as you pinball around a Slay the Spire-style map of encounters.
A PvE MOBA
Even in that old demo, Shape of Dreams immediately felt good to play and got my buildcrafting brain a-ticking, and I don't even particularly like MOBAs. Shim lives and breathes them, and so do countless gamers in South Korea, which was a "big factor" in this game's direction.
"All of our team plays MOBAs in some way," Shim says. "For me, I'm a big Heroes of the Storm enthusiast, and the co-founder, Kang, on the other hand, is a big League of Legends player. Our whole country, I think, League of Legends is The Game. The game that, when any general youngsters get around to play something, even if they don't play League or don't know what League is, they at least know who Faker is. So yeah, that was a big, big influencing factor for our game's development."
Translating the fun of MOBAs to a PvE environment, riffing on it with roguelike mechanics, and removing the stressors of PvP is a core part of the game design legwork with Shape of Dreams.
"Our game has that flavor of MOBAs, we call it a MOBA-infused action roguelike," Shim says. "The MOBA factor here, I think, acts as a kind of familiarity factor for experienced players, and for the uninitiated, it's just an ingredient, something unique and new. I played a lot of MOBAs, League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, and I know what's fun about it, but I also know how, sometimes, terrible the experience can be when you're playing the game. You are fighting your enemies, but at the same time, you're fighting your teammates in-game and verbally. I think that was something that can dishearten potential players. They don't like the stress in it.
"We tried to just remove the PvP aspect from MOBA and remove that stress, remove the need for extensive cooperation, that you can get flamed if you make a single mistake or something. But in doing that, that leaves a big hole in that genre. Even though competition can be stressful, that's also the fun for a lot of players. So what we thought of was filling in that void with the randomness of roguelikes and everything else that makes roguelikes fun. That would be a pretty great combo. So that's exactly what we did."
Shim points to the control scheme as one example. Originally, "we only supported MOBA controls when we were releasing our first demo in a Korean market, but we had a lot of feedback regarding it. Why are the controls so tiring? Why can't you be normal and play with twin-stick controls and stuff? Why doesn't it support gamepad? So we took those into account and started developing a lot – really, really hard to implement. I think it's near-perfect twin stick controls now. Players have a choice. And for the unfamiliar systems, we provide guidebooks and in-game tutorials and separate level tutorials."
I asked Shim what, in his view, is a sure sign of a good roguelike. A man of taste, he mentions games like Hades, Slay the Spire, and Dwarf Fortress. "Those games are really radically different, but all those games, what they have in common is that it kind of fits some kind of fantasy people have. For instance, Risk of Rain 2 gets you guns and kind of wants to build your engine and become a god that just moves around and kills everyone in sight. But in Slay the Spire, I think it's more focused on getting to survive. Making a powerful deck could also be the main purpose of playing the game. All that kind of boils down to just a single word: fun."
