DreamEcho is a roguelite beat ‘em up. Sure, it describes itself as a top-down action RPG, but that brings to mind something like Diablo, whereas this game is side-scrolling, more similar to games like Castle Crashers. You also aren’t collecting loot exactly, but abilities and spells, as well as memories that can unlock items to include in your future builds, provided you can figure out the game’s complexities.
The big thing in DreamEcho is the skills and progression systems. Skills, whether we’re talking weapon skills like a spinning attack or magic spells, are interchangeable here. You’ll find them whilst you’re playing and get to try them out. More than that, you can also find ways to trigger them when, for example, dodging or on a critical hit. This means you can have a fireball spell trigger every time you crit, or leave behind a meteor storm when you dash.
It’s a very adaptable and customisable scheme and just part of the extensive options you have for your character builds and general progression. You have the obvious like weapons, armour, and jewellery, all the way up to a skill tree that can be changed per build. That skill tree has nodes that can significantly change how your character plays as well, such as using your shield as additional mana, in addition to the usual extra attribute points and increasing summon limits.
Your options are so wide as to be almost indecipherable. The game kind of explains some things to you, but leaves many, many questions and a series of very complex menus with lots of stats on them. The skill tree isn’t quite Path of Exile level big, but it’s still big enough to be a bit intimidating. It takes some real commitment to get through this comprehension difficulty spike. Once you do break through there is a ton of adaptability for your character builds.
What doesn’t help with this is the AI translation of the game, which uses different terms for the same thing repeatedly and adds another layer of frustration to figuring everything out.
The game plays pretty well, with the fundamental controls and abiliites of many an action RPG roguelite… except you’re just side-scrolling through the rather tiny levels. The major issue here is that the game is very unbalanced. Playing as a summoner quickly gets powerful enough to wipe screens full of enemies before you really even need to move out of the way of an attack, and that’s before you even take any meta progression is taken into account. Other classes are similar, but are more of a slave to the RNG, where luck might keep key items out of your hands.
The end result is that the game ends up feeling dull after a few hours. By then, each run is either a cakewalk or a slog and you can tell which it’s going to be quite early on in the run. It’s a shame because it is very enjoyable to melt a screen full of enemies in a second, but then the novelty of it goes away and you’re left with little to do but hoover up an endless supply of memories to unlock an endless supply of very samey items. A certain type of person will be content to wade into all the stats and min-max their way into godliness, but the rest of us will get bored pretty quickly.
Outside of all this, the game is merely fine. It has a cartoony aesthetic that is a bit generic but doesn’t get in the way and it sounds good enough to get by as well. It’s not particularly remarkable in either of these respects but it’s not awful either. The UI leaves a little to be desired, especially the inventory of items you’ve acquired, which represents items with a simple image, one that is shared between items that have different stats, so you have to specifically highlight every single separately because you can’t tell a single thing about them but their item type with a glance.