It took a while for Shape of Dreams to grow on me. I was initially interested because it looked like a well-made rogue-like (and i love those), with a good art-style, and the lure of different character play-styles - and to be clear, all of those things are still there

What turned me off right away was the controller support. It is there, and it's competent, but this is clearly a game made for mouse & keyboard first. The little things give it away, like how focus moves through the various menus, or how left & right sticks fight over the direction of some abilities. To be fair, there does seem to be some good thought put into the controller layout itself, which is appreciated - making sure you don't need to take your thumbs off the sticks to fire abilities is a good one

Obviously not an issue if you intend to use KBM, and if you do, you'll find a MOBA-style control scheme - right-click & left-click for move & attack, Q-W-E-R for abilities, etc etc - and in fact, "PvE MOBA" feels like the best description of Shape of Dreams' core. It's probably meant to be played in co-op for that reason (i didn't), and so the playable characters fill different roles in the squad - tank, damage, support - but i tried them all out for a fair bit of time, and they all work fine on their own

Speaking of characters, they do in fact have a nice breadth of play-styles here. Some are more unique than others, and they could probably get even more freaky with it given some time, but changing between characters gives a good mindset refresh between runs, which is exactly what you need. Character development is pretty great too, with upgrade trees specific to each, as well as a shared pool, which is useful to give a leg-up to the toons you use less

Once i'd played a bunch of runs, and progressed things a decent amount, things started to click. I got into the zone of cycling cooldowns, dodging enemy attacks, and pushing forward. It's definitely more of a gameplay - rather than narrative - driven game, so if you aren't playing with friends, it becomes a podcast game, and.. now that i think about it, perhaps that tells you what was needed for me to enjoy this one properly