izigame.me

I know what you're thinking. "How original. A dice themed dungeon crawler? Woooo. Yeah, pass." That's exactly what I thought when I saw this. And that was a sin so grave, that when I got hit by a passing truck and died, I went to hell for it. It's actually not so bad - good company - but I still feel like you shouldn't make the same mistake as I did.
Because this game isn't just good. As in, yeah, it's fun to play, the characters are cute and interesting, the soundtrack is more fire than hell itself (trust me on this one)... but what's really going on here is that the game design is black magic levels of intricate and tight. It's elegant, it's very deep, and it's so insanely varied that you can spend an eternity playing this and still have fun. In fact, that's what I am doing - at the time of writing I have 117 hours, and I only died like last week!
At its core, Dicey Dungeons is a deckbuilder where action points are replaced by dice. You collect items (think cards), which you can put into your "battle deck" to use in combat, usually by feeding them one of your dice. Every character has their own set of items - some overlap, but not many - and there's a LOT of them. I have 100% achievement completion and beat all extra content, and when I watch friends play this game I *still* sometimes see cards that I've never seen before - mind, that's not due to missing unlocks, there's no such thing in this game.
Still, that wouldn't matter much if the core gameplay was bad. It's not. Yes, you have to rely on dice rolls, but there are ways to minimise your reliance on the RNG. And that's what this game really is about - constructing a deck that will keep you going in most circumstances, and then cleverly maximising the value of your dice. For example, take the Thief. His default loadout contains a Dagger; it's infinitely reusable, but it only accepts dice with 3 or lower. It's fine if you roll low, but what if you start rolling high? Well, in that case you either need some items that will split your dice into lower values, or something that will actually accept the high rolls. Which will it be? This is one of the most basic decisions you'll be making in this game.
There are multiple characters to choose from, too, each with their own special skill, a "limit break" ability (charged up by taking damage), and a general "theme" of items. Warrior is your typical high roller, roll high, bam, raw damage. The aforementioned Thief is the opposite; he wants to roll low (at least initially) and kill with a thousand tiny attacks. But then things get weird. There's the Robot, who doesn't roll all the dice but instead has a... CPU counter which increases with each roll? And it only gets weirder from there. To top it all off, things get heavily remixed in later episodes, and additional content switches things up even further. Like I said, black magic of game design.
So the game's good. Hellishly good, in fact. I've talked to Natalia, a witch from the 13th century, and she says this stuff would've totally gotten Terry Cavanagh burned at the stake back in her day. But there are a lot of good, yet overlooked games; why missing this one was enough to condemn me to eternal damnation?
Because on top of all that, the game manages to have a cast of lovable, diverse, unique, and just plain great characters - both your guys as well as the enemies. The game's dialogue is then used to tell a story - and that story is great as well! And it's all wraped in this pleasant, detailed graphical style, mixed with a strange musical concoction by Chipzel. She's always been a chiptune/electro artist, but now she threw some... SWING in? So you get a blend of chiptune, some decently hard bass and samples of saxophone, trumpet and even light vocals. And believe me when I say that the compositions themselves are TIGHT. There's one particular piece that just completely flies off the handle when it comes to (my understanding of) music theory; it's absolutely glorious.
Okay, look, Satan just came and told me that this review is proof enough of my repentance, so they're sending me back. I almost told him "no thanks", but then I remembered that this game exists in the mortal realm too, so I guess I'll keep on playing games and writing reviews for a few more decades, hopefully. And you should probably check out this game. It's pretty neat, I'd say.
Curator Page