Escape your nightmare, if you can

❓Are you familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos? Dreamescape is an upcoming card-based narrative exploration solo game by Bad Cat Games 🧭 You have been trapped in your dreams by Cthulhu the Great Old One 🐙- your mind was shattered into multiple fragments, and your only hope is to explore the dreamlands, search for the fragments and find a gate to wake up before you lose your sanity. 😱

This is a choose-your-own-adventure type game, however instead of a book you get decks of cards. This implementation of cards allows subsequent games to feel different, as you will experience things in various sequences - and thus mimicking the hazy nature of dreams! Replaying the game is actually essential too, as it’s very difficult to survive and escape, so the information you gather will serve as a deja-vu like meta-knowledge to help during new playthroughs. (If you’ve played similar adventure books in the past, you know it’s easy to meet your demise 😅)

You can choose one of six characters to play as, all with different skills, stats, abilities and interconnected stories. 🧐 Depending on what fragment you start with, your journey can begin in different locations. Although grasping the rules wasn’t easy at first (a step-by-step guide booklet did the heavy lifting 😄), the general flow of the game is pretty straightforward: You will draw a random encounter card from your current location deck, read it, then decide what to do from different options. Your decisions most often involve a skill check, after which you read what happens - with different results for success or failure.

Skill Checks use runes 🀄 - two-sided tokens that depict half or full symbols. You toss these up and count your whole symbols, to check whether you meet the required amount.
Your pool of runes will change depending on what skills and items you have.

As you go deeper into your dreams you might change locations/decks, and gather more items or lore cards. An interesting mechanic is how certain cards show icons on them - matching up icons from different cards can lead you across hidden paths! 🕵️

We will share more about Dreamescape, as we approach the start of its crowdfunding campaign on Gamefound!