Quasimorph: End of Dream was released on May 31, 2023 just a few days ago and has already earned a lot of positive feedback in the steam reviews. The game is a free prologue for Quasimorph, a 2d “dark turn-based extraction RPG” developed by Magnum Scriptum. I took a look at the game myself and will share my experiences and opinion on it in this first look article.
Impressions
In Quasimorph: End of Dream you play as a PMC, a cloned fighter for a company. Your goal is to eliminate all enemies in the way to your mission objective while grabbing valuable items and enough food and medicine to survive.
You can only see an area around you, the rest of the map is hidden. Rooms are mostly separated by doors that can be opened. Furthermore you can find some barriers that provide cover or hide behind corners to avoid enemy contact while healing. If you die during a mission all the progress is lost and you’ll return to your spaceship.
There are lots of weapons that can be found which all use different ammunition types and have stats that make them either good for close of ranged combat. Speaking of close combat: you can also attack with melee weapons as most of the enemies on the easier stages of a mission.
Similar to the variety of weapons there are also different enemy types to be found in the game: some look like human mercenaries, there are spiders and some weird creatures that turn into a different enemy after you kill them.
Things I like
The idea that you can only see a certain area of the map and enemies could hide behind every corner is scary and exciting at the same time as it adds a sense of dynamic to the game experience and really motivated me to keep going even though I failed most of my early runs.
All items and the environment is beautifully textured in a really detailed pixel art style. The animations feel very smooth and the sound effects are pretty scary and well done. Especially the shotgun sound feels very nice. The soundtrack is a banger and really helps to convey the scary atmosphere and pressure while fighting in the dark rooms.
The dialogue boxes have a nice design to them and even though you get thrown into a story you get to know fast what you need to know and who you are as a character in game. There is an audio dialogue playing when you arrive after traveling to a different planet.
Things I don’t like
The game more or less throws you into your first mission, there is an introduction to what you’re supposed to find as a mission goal but no explanation of game mechanics. This can be found if you click on ESC > Help > Controls.
Surviving gets quite hard after taking an elevator to a different floor of the base in the Venus “Flower Dream” mission, getting good gear and enough medical items is mostly luck based and many of my runs just ended by getting demolished by some big monster that grew out of a smaller one. But I think after you get familiar with the mechanics this won’t be a problem anymore.
Conclusion
Quasimorph: End of Dream: The prologue for Quasimorph is a beautiful constructed presentation of game mechanics, art style and environmental design and introduces you to the pixel extraction shooter. Everything feels well made and we're excited for the launch of the real game as it's regularly getting updates with bugfixes. A bit more help for beginners would be cool but not really the most important thing. – GLPC: emk
