Dreamkiller announced for the 360

Mindware Studios have today announced that they will be releasing their new shooter on the Xbox 360 and PC.

Dreamkiller is being billed as a fast, frantic and mega-bloodbath first-person shooter, which takes gamers inside the dark and twisted nightmares of tortured souls possessed by unknown forces.

Gamers will take on the role of Alice Drake, a psychologist with the extraordinary ability to enter the minds of her patients and combat the ravenous foes haunting their dreams. Utilizing a host of fantastic weapons and her own special abilities, Alice confronts common demons only to discover an even deeper menace reigns within. The ultimate showdown becomes inevitable between that which would torment and she who will protect, and only one force will prevail amidst a variety of dreamscapes as varied and bizarre as the human mind itself.

Dreamkiller features 12 rich levels of single-player gameplay each laced with swarms of hideous and disturbing enemies reflecting the mind’s infinite palette of fear. The onslaught continues with numerous multiplayer modes and a host of over-the-top weapons and supernatural abilities.

The game is due for release this Fall/Autumn and is to be published by Aspyr Media.

The premise puts Dreamkiller in fairly unusual company for a shooter. Rather than a war zone, an alien invasion or a zombie outbreak, the battlegrounds are the minds of Alice Drake’s patients, with each of the game’s 12 levels built around a different person’s specific fears and traumas. That framing gives the art team license to design enemies and environments drawn from horror and surrealist imagery rather than the standard military or sci-fi trappings most shooters lean on, and it means the game can shift tone and setting dramatically from one level to the next without needing a conventional in-world explanation for the change of scenery.

Structuring a game around distinct, self-contained mental landscapes isn’t an entirely new idea — other titles have used the concept of hopping between different characters’ psyches as a way to justify wildly different level themes within a single campaign — but applying it to a fast-paced, weapon-heavy first-person shooter rather than an adventure or platforming game gives Dreamkiller a different rhythm. Each dreamscape functions less like a puzzle to explore and more like an arena to be cleared, with the “mega-bloodbath” pacing promised in the announcement suggesting the emphasis sits squarely on constant, escalating combat rather than exploration or story pacing between fights.

Publishing duties were handed to Aspyr Media, a company more commonly associated with bringing existing PC titles to a wider audience, which suggested plans for Dreamkiller to reach beyond a single territory once it launched. Pairing a horror-tinged premise with a heavy focus on multiplayer modes also hinted at ambitions past a straightforward single-player campaign, positioning the game as something players might return to for score-chasing or competitive matches once the story missions were cleared.