Dreamwild is surreal, beautiful, and one of the most underrated games I've ever played—now's the perfect time to revisit it

Hi, Hello! I've been running HitReload since September with a newsletter every week, but with the PC Gaming Show airing on Thursday, I've had to take this week off to make sure the show goes smoothly. This has coincided with the biggest single-week jump in subscribers I've seen so far, and so I am unleashing my friend and PC Gamer Associate Editor Ted Litchfield to keep you company. I'll be using the time after the PCGS to start thinking about what 2025 looks like for HitReload, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on how you're enjoying the newsletter so far. Just hit reply and let me know what you think. In the meantime, herrrre's Teddy. - Jake

Hello gamers, this is Ted Litchfield speaking, Jake's friend and coworker. The big man has gone on sabbatical, seeking new heights of enlightenment—to actually escape from Tarkov, or "Saṃsāra" as it's called in Buddhist and Hindu mythology.

While Jake is on this journey of self-discovery, I'm here to carry the torch of FPS newsletter writing. To that end, let's get down to brass tacks on some bullshit nobody seems to care about but me—with luck, maybe you too will love this game like I do by the end of the day.

Back in January, a free dungeon crawler/survival horror/adventure thing called Psychopomp tore shit up on Steam—at least as much as solo dev, "out there" indie games are able to, anyway—with an expanded, paid version of the game finding similar success later on. I was heartened to see developer Fading Club knock it outta the park like this, because its previous game, DreamWild, is a lowkey favourite of mine and maybe one of the most underrated games I've ever played. An $8 game that just blew me away with its imagination and atmosphere, a shooter whose praise I kept singing over at my day job, and to this day it only has a paltry 205 reviews on Steam.

DreamWild is a hybrid horde shooter and roguelike, with classico, Quake-style bunnyhopping-centric movement, an opaque, mysterious sensibility, and some of my favourite visuals in any videogame. Each level is a desolate but brightly-coloured moonscape, something halfway between a Bryce3D render and an Uncharted World from Mass Effect 1 (those always whipped ass, by the way). My favourite remains the Sunken Ground (Cambrian Technology Bed), a lush, tropical swamp under an offensively teal sky, angular ruins and strange Mesoamerican discs jutting out of the ground.

God, and the music! The Sunken Ground's track just hits me over the head with a sense of mystery and adventure, a half-forgotten feeling from childhood that dovetails perfectly with the uncanny nostalgia of the visuals. For a few other highlights, the main menu theme is a banger that goes bafflingly hard, and the tune for the first level of every run, the Scourge Plains, is such a calming, dreamy track to accompany the orangey-purple wasteland of that zone.

While you start each run in the Scourge Plains, portals to other DreamWilds and a peaceful NPC home base area are procedurally scattered through a zone on loading in, meaning that no two runs will feel exactly the same. The core loop sees you surviving infinitely spawning enemies, collecting red stars from them that you can use to upgrade your weapon and health back at base. Your overarching goal is to collect two keys from temples that spawn in the DreamWilds in order to unlock a pathway to the final world.

That home base, by the way, is a visual and atmospheric treat on the order of the DreamWilds themselves. You transition from '90s FPS chunky polygons to '90s RPG/adventure pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds, guiding your little knight through a castle beyond time and space. There's a gaggle of funky, claymation-looking NPCs for you to talk to, and a fleshy noodle merchant man who will upgrade your gear.

The moment-to-moment shooting is quite fun, but not why I love DreamWild. Bunnyhopping about is a real joy, and I've found a kind of meditative appeal to kiting enemies around, bouncing and zooming through these strange worlds. But while there's a wonderful variety to enemy appearances, they all kind of fight the same: floating or trundling toward you at various speeds, some of them launching projectiles to spice things up. A few real assholes can zoom at crazy speed, knocking you back in addition to damaging you—a particular pain in the final level, which requires more precise platforming than the rest of the game.

DreamWild's opacity and refusal to explain itself is something I love about it—stepping through a portal to see another DreamWild or the home base art style shift for the first time was sublime—but I could also find it frustrating in places. The final level's brutal platforming can be somewhat ameliorated with a hidden grappling hook power-up, but its random spawns and the fact that you need

another item to even reach it means acquiring the tool is almost as big a headache as the level it's supposed to help with. Meanwhile, I've had a lot of good runs end with me getting knocked off the tower climb in the final area.

And I think that's part of the story with Psychopomp finding so much more success, in addition to that hard-to-beat initial price of "free." Psychopomp has puzzles, but the basic structure of the game itself is not a puzzle. Further, its slower-paced exploration and simple melee combat are a lot more approachable than a retro-oriented shooter where a certain amount of movement tech is basically a requirement. This is all while Psychopomp has the same quality of art, music, atmosphere, and just showing me something I wouldn't see anywhere else that I love about DreamWild.

But I'll be damned if DreamWild isn't still my heart pick of the two. I just love this goddamn $8 game, and I'm still thinking about it two years later. Check it out on Steam and thank me later—or direct any complaints to Mr. Tucker.

Out this week

I'm reviewing Indiana Jones and his Bigass Circle for PC Gamer, and I'm contractually obligated not to say more than that at this time—tune in tomorrow for my full review! Indy's technically out at the beginning of next week, but it's before the next newsletter, so it still counts.

Other than that, Jake and the other milsim kiddies in my life seem excited about Delta Force, while I cannot picture in my mind the kind of person who might be excited for Marvel Rivals.

• Delta Force - Dec 4
• Marvel Rivals - Dec 5
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - Dec 8

Gibs

• I wrote about Icelandic strongman Hafþór Björnsson deadlifting nearly a thousand pounds of SSDs in a silly marketing stunt. Tawdry and flashy? Perhaps, but that's kind of the spirit of strongman: Trading stuffy, systemized competition for the most lizard-brain, badass spectacle possible. That's why I love it.
• Late to the party, but Dragon Age: The Veilguard kind of whips. Definitely agree with my coworker Lauren's critiques in her review, I'm just enjoying it more despite them. It also helps that I don't have to squeeze a 60+ hour game into an embargo window—I'm able to indulge in my classic RPG quirk of rerolling my guy after 20 hours in favor of a slightly different one (he's a really hot Qunari Rogue now instead of an Elf one). Come for the excellent buildcrafting and ARPG combat—something BioWare's consistently been good at, even in its wilderness years—stay for the overall solid cast (maybe an overall B+ compared to BG3 or Origins' S-tier) and weirdly good Metroidvania level design. For the first time in a long time, I feel optimistic about BioWare.
• It's wild that Larian is adding another 12 subclasses to Baldur's Gate 3. I've beaten it three times, with one co-op game running and another under consideration, yet I'm still not sick of it. I wonder if any of the new guys will shake up my favorite builds. Currently, my top three are Oathbreaker Paladin / Dragon Sorcerer, Swords Bard / Thief / Fighter, and Open Hand Monk / Thief.
• The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted is tomorrow (December 5)! Tune in to see why Jake actually couldn't write this week's newsletter. He will never escape from Escape From Tarkov.
• A little Jake added extra (hello!), Ubisoft is pulling the plug on XDefiant after six months, because games as a service is lowkey doomed. More on this next week, I reckon.