What even is a roguelike? And no, I'm not asking for a definition. I don't give a shit about words. Especially that one, which exists as a part of a long and storied lineage of dumb video game genre terms some tech-bro made up 30 years ago that I have to pretend makes sense. Immersive Sim? MOBA? Roguelike? SOULSLIKE? Give me a fucking break. No. I'm Jerry Seinfelding here. What's the deal with roguelikes? What's under the proverbial hood? What is the enduring appeal of the genre? If we're talking a featherweight roguelite (don't even get me started) like Hades, then the structure is just a hat. I like Hades quite a bit, but only because the ok hack-and-slash with a nice colour scheme is attached to an anime sexyman visual novel that I first saw at a very unfortunate time in my life. I don't think the structure of runs as an exercise in acquiring more brute strength until you can topple the game through force is very compelling. It's at odds with what draws me to roguelikes.

No. To me, the best roguelikes are puzzle games in disguise. They are trial and error, information-gathering experiences where 99% of your time playing is gobbling up every morsel of information about your environment and tools until a solution becomes clear. The actual act of solving the puzzle is a small but euphoric cap to the major experience. Journey, destination, blah blah blah. Dicey Dungeons is this interpretation of the roguelike rendered as literally as possible. It is the purest vision of the genre any 'deckbuilding' roguelike has ever been.

Don't get me wrong. I love Slay the Spire and other actual card game roguelikes. But they are a more abstract problem-solving puzzle that evolves from run to run. They are about long-term planning and building complex synergies throughout a run. The macro game of combat is less important than the micro game of planning. This is still true for Dicey Dungeons, with the caveat that it has much less going on behind the eyes. Any individual run has a very small pool of available weapons and enemies that always appear in a close-to-set order. There is build variety, but only a little. It's as shallow as an inflatable kiddy pool, and one wrong move can let the air out of the entire experience. But, if you're itching to soak in 10 centimetres of cold hose water for an hour or two, it's beautiful.

To me Dicey Dungeons is 36 (+1) unique ~20-30 minute puzzles. It isn't about grinding for the perfect build or blowing your enemies to smithereens with a game-breaking combo (though through the power of multiplication, this can occasionally happen). There aren't even any unlockables! It's about resource management. How can I navigate this die through this particular gimmick? Well, I'll trial and error a little, and now that I know what I'll have access to and what enemies I'll need to fight, I can plot it out in my head and solve it. It's a cute little nerdy numbers game for nerds! I love it!

RNG is a big part of any game in this genre, and I think I'd be willing to agree that this is a pretty egregious example of such on paper. It's hard to argue with the fact that every single attack comes down to a literal dice roll. But I'm a fan of it. The enemies are nearly set in stone (You will see the Kraken every run, and you will like it!). The routes are extremely simple. Your weapons vary only a little between attempts. The variance in combat is where this game makes your problem-solving shine. How do I account for bad rolls? How do I build myself around the possibility of any roll? How do I ensure specific rolls? It's the closest the game gets to strategically exciting, and it's predicated on your finding of interesting interactions between abilities, as opposed to pre-ordained build types. The game has those, too; they're just lame. This is where it truly distinguishes itself from its peers. When you've got a real dice engine going, it feels like a personal mad scientist scheme. I'm not playing a poison build or an armour build or whatever. I've found some absurd combination of abilities that lets me ensure I roll many high numbers and do a ton of damage. You make your luck in a very literal sense! Of course, you can just get completely fucked, but I think you deserve the bad things that happen to you.

The classes and 'rooms' (AKA ascension levels) are distinct enough that blowing through all 36 is a genuinely fun time. Do not go into this expecting a massively replayable deck builder. It's easy to be disappointed; this uncomplicated puzzle game wears the shell of a much deeper experience. Just try to soak in the bouncy game show sounds and sights, and have fun having your brain mildly stretched by a refreshingly compact mathy good time. I can hear the comical souring of some of your faces as I say "Math", but if you enjoyed Mathletics as much as I did in primary school, you'll love it.

Terry Cavanagh is one of the great ambassadors for funny-looking little cartoon dudes. God Bless.

To nintendoamerica3@hotmail.com

Cc reggiefilsaime@gmail.com +70102 others

Big Fat Fucking Stacks of Cash

Dearest Nintendo,

Just steal this dude's fucking game and sell it for 20 bucks. "Oh, how do I make money? Oh, it's so hard being a mega-corporation worth billions of dollars, waaaa" Just steal his game and put it on the Nintendo Switch. What's he going to do, sue you? It's literally a free 100 million dollars. Why would you not do this?

Yours sincerely,

The only smart person in the history of video games (Henry Vines)

For a particular brand of TF2ber comment section dweller, Gigantic was a golden goose. For years, you'd hear whispered tales of a mythical shooter that was everything the community had ever wanted. A game with an infinite skill ceiling, euphoric movement, a colourful cartoony personality, and a perfect midway between the flashy abilities of Overwatch and the customisability of Paladins with legitimate accessibility for both the competitive and casual scenes. It was the perfect game. But most of us (Heathens) were blinded by humanity's ego and allowed this perfect artefact of humankind to crumble into the aether, destined to exist only in the squalor of secret community LAN matches and seedy dive bar discord servers.

Egads, the Son of man returns! While I am no longer the kind of hero shooter acolyte itching for this game's revival, my younger brother is, and he shattered glass with the screams of excitement when he found out this was coming back. How could I not join in? Immediately, my eyebrows were raised by a few things. Gearbox has somehow got their name on this now. Abstraction Games are 'developing,' probably in the same way they developed Baldur's Gate 3 by helping with the Steam version and then plastering it on their website's front page. The original creators, Motiga, are nowhere to be found. Their name isn't on the game at all. Interviews indicate some of them had a small advisory role in this project. Still, I've found no evidence they'll be receiving compensation for their work in, you know, making the game, so hopefully, this kind of post-mortem revival project doesn't become normal. It is a situation pungent with the scent of an executive getting too excited about social media analytics and the quick buck he believes could be acquired. The continued server issues do not help the case.

But the real story here is none of this. I played this game for the first time yesterday. This shit is a fucking MOBA! How could you guys lie to me like this for years? Gigantic originally shut down in July 2018, and for over half a decade, people told me how exciting of a hero shooter it was and how it revolutionised movement shooters as a genre! It's a fucking MOBA! You sit there in a shitty team fight, and everyone sprays everyone else with multi-coloured goo, and the people who've played the game before run away, and the people who actually want to have fun die. Like every other fucking MOBA! I have been the target of one of the longest and most effective psyops in history and I am distraught!