I Keep Having This Dream is a delightful little game that I would keep playing to completion if my plate wasn't already full as-is with other games to look at. It's a roguelike puzzle game where you place tiles in order to get to the exit of a series of increasingly difficult levels while followed by an entity called the nemesis. You level up and find new gear, you unlock new enemies and new events to hinder and help you and you try to get as far as you can. It's great!
The core mechanic of the game is that you place tiles. You have a list of five tiles with different patterns and different things on them and you have to create a path following a compass that tells you where the exit is. Tiles can have various symbols; healing you, increasing your attack or defense, special symbols that must be placed on special spots of the map in order to get you gear, etc. There also are enemies - snags - that you will eventually need to place on your way, both to get experience and because sometimes you won't have a choice. The game tells you how dangerous the enemy is so you can make a quick at-a-glance decision most of the time.
Whenever you get to a dead end - which can be frustratingly easy sometimes if you're not careful - the nemesis moves to your tile. When you discard tiles because they're unwanted, the nemesis will move based on its level - a number that increases when you do various things - and when your HP gets to 0, the nemesis moves until it has consumed enough experience tiles. If at any point the nemesis gets to you, you lose. Otherwise you could keep dying and getting revived forever, as long as you can outrun that enemy.
Although the game is very generous with tooltips and tutorials, even after playing it for a whole week I was a bit confused about some of the mechanics, core actions like attacking and getting attacked where hard for me to resolve in my head, mainly because you lose a third of your attack and half your defense every fight 'turn' which is weird. The way the nemesis moves can be hard to predict as well. By defeating enemies and getting experience, you level up, increasing one of three stat and choosing one skill. Your stats - both from level-ups and from items - influence the value ranges your tiles will get. The skills are very interesting and no matter what your playstyle is, there'll be something for you.
Special snags come in many different forms and they all have formidable special abilities that you need to really think in order to survive. Some of them are quite simpler - like ones that you can only place if you have enough health tiles - but others will freeze your tiles, increase their stats over time, create damaging tiles if you place them, and you can't discard them! If you're not careful, you'll get a hand full of special snags and you'll be in dire straits. Luckily after a while you unlock events which are charged by collecting various tiles and provide beneficial effects that can be cashed in when the time is right. You also get gear, initially only providing stat boosts but after a while you get special effects on them.
When you die, you get a score and keys based on it and you can use the keys to unlock cosmetic changes to your character, unlock new special snags or new events. It's a great way to make you want to do another run, potentially facing a new foe but similarly armed with a new tool. It's something I wish I could keep doing, you really should try IKHTD, it's a really neat game!
