‘Dark Fairy Tale: Dreamland Survivors’ Has Great Art and Good Ideas, but It Needs Some Polish Before Release (Demo Impressions)

Once Vampire Survivors became as big as it did, we should have known that a new genre was about to be born. Survivors-likes — or Bullet Heaven games, as some know them — are quite popular right now. Plenty of folks are jumping on the bandwagon with mixed results. Some of them are great. Games like Relic Abyss have shown how to do the genre well, while adding new features to keep things interesting. Dark Fairy Tale: Dreamland Survivors is also on the right path, but further optimization is needed before this one is ready for the limelight. Good thing it’s just a demo right now and not the full release, as this gives the development team plenty of time to fix these issues.

The Ideas this Brings to the Table Are Interesting, but Need Some Refinement Before Release

On the surface, Dark Fairy Tale: Dreamland Survivors looks and feels like your typical Vampire Survivors clone. But it does try a few things differently that help it stand apart from the pack. Firstly, in the demo build, there is only one playable character: Pinocchio. As this little wooden boy, I had to do whatever I could to try and survive. Multiple weapon types, such as Casters, Lancers, and Archers, were available to utilize. Of course, they all had different variations and plenty of build variety. This way, I could turn Pinocchio into an unstoppable, God-tier creature of chaos. But it took a few runs to finally come to grips with everything.

Dark Fairy Tale: Dreamland Survivors is a rather attractive game, if not sometimes visually cloudy. It’s bright and colorful, but it can be easy to lose track of what’s going on within the midst of chaos. It could be since characters on screen are much larger than in other typical Vampire Survivors or Brotato clones. But even when things were going south quickly, I was still having fun. Another interesting part of Dark Fairy Tale: Dreamland Survivors is the wave-based gameplay, instead of your typical “endless” runs.

Gathering Eggs was also a unique gimmick of this game. Using these Power Eggs, I could either devour them for a permanent, lower stat boost or activate up to 5 per run for a much larger stat boost. It’s an interesting idea, and it made each run all the more dynamic.

Interesting Ideas Aside, ‘Dark Fairy Tale: Dreamland Survivors’ Needs Some Extra Polish

But the main gripe I had with the Dark Fairy Tale: Dreamland Survivors demo was the lack of polish across the board. Text would overflow outside of buttons. If I paused in the middle of a run, Pinocchio would come flying across the screen when restarting, jolting everything out of the action for just a few moments. And more often than not, the information on the Power Egg screen was not correct. At times, it would say that I only got a +1 when it was actually a +10 boost to the affected stat.

The team behind the game is rather small, but I hope that they can iron out the bugs before release. With a tentative release date set for June 20, 2025, the game needs a few patches before it should be considered ready. Overall, I could see this developing a cult following. It has a great look and game feel. But this close to release, a lot of these bugs should have already been squashed. I would suggest trying it. If you’re willing to look past some of the more glaring issues? Dark Fairy Tale: Dreamland Survivors is a fun game under the surface with a ton of potential depth.