Lucid Steam

Lucid Steam is a turn-based dungeon-crawling roguelike set in an engineer’s lucid dream, a world of machines powered by magic and steam. You design routes through dungeons, explore for loot and use equipment and artifacts to defeat monsters and bosses. The engineer must escape the dream; as time passes, bizarre and powerful monsters appear.

Explore the dungeon

The map is made of tiles that can hold monsters, loot chests, events and other special locations. Question-mark tiles conceal what lies ahead, while shops and treasure chests provide reliable ways to obtain items: you buy character-enhancing items with money in shops and find artifacts in chests. After battles, you can also obtain items. When you encounter a monster, you decide whether to fight or take another route to avoid it.

You use route cards to build paths. These cards have yellow icons, and you can rotate a route while constructing it; once a tile is built, its path is fixed except in special cases. Green-icon move cards let you travel between created routes, normally only along connected paths. Special movement cards include a jump, which crosses to an unconnected path, and a pioneer, which creates a path after moving to an unconnected one.

Manage the journey

You begin with basic cards and dungeons, and receive a deck of new cards as you explore. When that deck runs out, you must use the cards in your hand to reach the next floor; failing to get there means defeat. You also lose if your health reaches zero in battle.

Avoiding every battle to focus only on map design is not a good strategy. The nightmare gauge rises as turns pass and increases monsters’ stats as you progress through a stage. It resets when you move to the next stage.

Fight with dice

Battles begin when you encounter a monster. At the start of each turn, you roll dice and choose an action. The dice have three scales: physical attack, magic attack and defense. Items can add dice scales, and swapping equipment can help you make the most of your roll that turn.

Equipment and tokens

Equipment has 11 different stats, and some items have special effects. The stats cover basic physical attack, basic magic attack and basic defense, as well as strength, intelligence and agility, which improve the corresponding physical, magic and defense dice scales. Equipment can also add physical, magic or defense dice.

Some equipment has a warm-up time and cannot be equipped until that time reaches zero. It activates at the start of battle, then its warm-up time decreases by one at the end of each turn. Equipment can also have a cooldown time that prevents replacing or installing it in its slot; the cooldown decreases by one at the end of each turn. Other special effects activate when equipment is replaced or removed, including effects that use residual heat.

Tokens grant a dice scale matching their pattern when used in battle. You can also use them as keys on the game map.