Never before in my gaming experience have I found a game quite like Edge of Dreams. It takes inspiration from a plethora of different genres and games and somehow manages to make something challenging and engaging. Edge of Dreams is a first person shooter (FPS) rougelike game from Tlylaxu. The game has you fighting your way through rooms, picking up items, buying power-ups, and hoping not to die as you’ll start right back at the beginning.
Edge of Dreams takes inspiration from many popular sci-fi shooter games. You don’t have to reload, but your weapon will run out of energy, similar to DOOM. You have three abilities unique to each class, similar to Overwatch. Even the overall aesthetic of the game feels like it was pulled out of the Halo universe so much as to have “skull-like” difficulty modifiers, such as one hit death. Edge of Dreams takes all of these aspects and combines them with the challenge of a rougelike game.
There are a few things that really stood out to me in my time with Edge of Dreams. Firstly, the difficulty. Good lord this game is hard. I generally try to play games on the medium setting to give myself some challenge, while still being able to absorb the story. Edge of Dreams does difficulty a little differently. There are the standard three difficulty settings (Easy, Medium, and Hard) but what makes Edge of Dreams unique is that with every room you enter the difficulty gauge will increase (as seen in the top left of the screenshot above). This made playing on medium extremely difficult and I had to opt to play on easy. However, don’t be fooled, easy is no cake-walk either. The difficulty still climbs every room you enter, and by the time I was finishing up a run the difficulty level would be at impossible.
Another thing that I find astounding about this game is that there is a ton of replayability. There are seven different weapon classes (with what appears to be more on the way in future updates), each with three unique class abilities. This is accompanied by a large selection of power-ups that can be unlocked. After you either win or lose (complete all three stages or die) you will be given points for the run, and you can use these points to unlock new power-ups in the modules shop. This gives players the incentive to try new weapons, and play over and over to try to collect all of the modules.
A smaller detail that I find endearing is that the game seems to not take itself too seriously, placing Easter Eggs throughout. For one, if you examine some of the in-game soda machines you can spot an option for carrot soda. This tickled me in just the right way. There also may be a small nod to the film, The Matrix, as I found two healing items labeled B-Pill and R-Pill. I did find an S-Pill as well, but I like to think the B and R-Pills are a reference to the red and blue pills in the film. Lastly, there is an optional room you can enter before you start your climb through the sectors. It is a lounge with restaurants and NPCs just hanging about. You can see in the screenshot below how they gather around someone in full military armor playing a guitar.
Edge of Dreams is wonderful and it was great to play through a different take on the roguelike genre. I said it before and I will say it again,
Edge of Dreams is wonderful and it was great to play through a different take on the roguelike genre. I said it before and I will say it again, Edge of Dreams is novel. I haven’t ever had the pleasure of playing a roguelike from an FPS perspective. Edge of Dreams is extremely playable, and rewards you for the time that you put in with better power-ups, different weapons, and a new layout of the sectors every time you start a run. So pick up yer rifle, go shoot some baddies, and try to stay alive.
