Shape of Dreams Lands on Switch 2 With Crossplay, New Hero

Lizard Smoothie didn’t need a stage for this one. Shape of Dreams — the Risk of Rain-flavored action roguelike whose combat leans on MOBA-style ability kits — has spent a full year quietly stacking up Steam sales, and its console reveal landed as a shadowdrop during Xbox’s Tokyo Game Show showcase: PlayStation, Xbox, and, most importantly for us, Nintendo Switch 2, all shipping with full crossplay from day one. For handheld players, that last detail is the entire headline. It turns the Switch 2 build from a stripped-down afterthought into a genuine peer in every matchmaking pool, and it means your portable run isn’t quarantined from the PC players who’ve been grinding this thing since September 2025.

The anniversary update arrives on every platform simultaneously — no staggered rollout, no waiting months for the handheld patch. That package brings a new playable character, the ice leviathan Cetus, plus additional story content and new options for existing characters. With 1.5 million copies already sold and a five-person studio behind it, Shape of Dreams is now a multi-platform roguelike with a live-content cadence that handheld owners can actually plan around.

Crossplay Is What Makes the Switch 2 Build Worth Owning

A roguelike run is the ideal handheld unit of play — 20 to 40 minutes, a clean stopping point, and a loop that rewards a quick session on the couch or the commute. What usually breaks that rhythm on consoles is the lobby: small install bases on a brand-new platform mean thin matchmaking and long queues. Full crossplay solves exactly that — the kind of fix that’s made Switch 2 co-op worth taking seriously. Your Switch 2 sessions fill from the same pool as PS5, Xbox, and Steam, and Cetus plus the new story beats drop everywhere at once, so you’re never the player stuck on last month’s meta while everyone else has moved on.

There’s a caveat that comes with that parity, though. Crossplay titles live and die by their network connection, and a roguelike with MOBA-inspired combat is a real-time, input-sensitive affair — this is not a turn-based game you can shrug through on a spotty hotel Wi-Fi. The suspend-resume strengths that make the Deck and Switch 2 so good for single-player runs matter less here. If you’re buying Shape of Dreams specifically to play with a squad, budget for reliable connectivity; the offline solo loop is the safer handheld bet.

1.5 Million Steam Copies, But No Performance Targets Yet

Here’s what we can say with confidence and what we can’t. Shape of Dreams has been on Steam for a year, it plays well with a controller per GamesRadar’s own hands-on, and it’s already proven on the Deck by virtue of existing — anyone with a Deck can boot it today. Neither Lizard Smoothie nor Nintendo has published a frame-rate or resolution target for the Switch 2 or console builds, so anyone quoting a locked 60 is guessing.

What I can tell you is that the benchmark is favorable. The most obvious comparison point is Risk of Rain 2, the game the dev team openly cites as its inspiration and a title that runs comfortably on the Deck at its capped frame rate. Shape of Dreams sits in the same broad category — a two-player-scale action roguelike with stylized art and MOBA-flavored abilities rather than a sprawling 3D simulation — which suggests it should be a low-stress Deck install. The honest answer on the Switch 2 side is that we don’t know until it launches. The genre’s track record says it should fit handhelds neatly; the marketing hasn’t said a word.

A Five-Person Studio Playing the Long Game Is Good News for Portables

The most useful thing in GamesRadar’s interview isn’t the Cetus reveal — it’s CEO Eunseop Shim’s post-mortem. He’s blunt that the launch shipped without enough playtesting, that players pushed back hard on the progression and balance direction, and that the team spent launch week “working overtime to put out the fire.” He’s equally blunt that he isn’t done: he references Risk of Rain 2-style update and expansion support and teases a whole new game mode he won’t describe yet. “I am not letting this game go,” he says.

For handheld players that commitment is worth more than any single update — the long-game turnaround No Man’s Sky’s redemption arc proved out. Roguelikes are the genre you keep installed for years — the one that survives every storage purge because it’s always good for one more run — so a studio that intends to keep feeding it new characters and modes compounds the value of the copy sitting on your microSD card. If the Deck performance holds and the Switch 2 version lands clean, Shape of Dreams becomes one of the easier roguelike recommendations to leave permanently installed. Watch for the console build’s real-world numbers at launch before you commit, but the trajectory here is pointing in the right direction.