The core combat loop of Dicey Dungeons is pretty simple - at the start of your turn you roll a bunch of dice, activate your equipment/abilities by plugging the dice into them, then pass the turn over to your opponent. Wash, rinse, repeat. There's a huge variety of equipment available, from the bread-and-butter 'Sword' which simply does damage equal to the value of the dice you plugged into it, to healing magic, to equipment with powerful effects that require a specific number to activate, and stuff that helps you manipulate your dice values, essentially using an item slot on a way to mitigate bad rolls in exchange for slightly lowering your combat capability.
I thought I'd kick off my thoughts with a look at a little detail: one of the more common status effects is called 'frozen dice', which for the next turn reduces the afflicted character's highest dice roll to a one, and it stacks. So if I get two dice frozen and roll 6 5 1, that hand becomes three ones, which can be extremely debilitating to some builds. Enter the Yeti, an enemy with a powerful attack that requires two ones to activate. Such a specific requirement means that you won't see that attack often at all... unless you freeze his dice, in which case good luck to you. It's little details like this that I adore - the usage of simple combat mechanics to represent more complex ideas, and in a more creative way than simply "Yeti is immune to ice attacks" is something that Dicey Dungeons excels at.
It's also dangerously addictive, being the latest in an exclusive list of games that have massacred my sleep schedule for week upon week. The vast array of available abilities as well as the many ways to create synergistic builds mean that this dice-rolling game has a deceptive amount of skill and strategy to go with its accessibility and charm. It also has what I consider a virtue among roguelikes - a very short run duration (simple episodes can be completed in under 20 minutes!) which keep play sessions bite-sized and ensure losing runs don't sting too much.
It does have its fair share of frustrations, though the chief one (the extremely luck-based nature of combat) is definitely deliberate; it certainly fits thematically with the premise of hapless player-characters fumbling through a rigged gameshow run by an avatar of Luck. Some other frustrations can be reasonably classified as 'flaws' though. The balance is somewhat wonky, with some enemies being way overpowered and some skills massively out-usefulling others. The game's UI sometimes withholds relevant information - as an example, you get a full heal upon level up so you might want to play more conservatively if you're about to level up to perhaps save your limit break for the next fight... but while your exp bar is shown outside of battle, it isn't shown in-battle so it's easy to forget how far away you are from the next level in the midst of combat. And while this sounds like a minor quibble, the fact is that you need to consistently make good decisions with all the information you have on hand because so much else is out of your hands, and the game really should make all the relevant information readily available!
Also, despite the countless ways the game iterates upon its rulesets to stay fresh - six episodes for six characters for a total of 36 subtly different play experiences! - it did feel like my runs started to blend together after awhile because there wasn't quiiite enough variety in the gameplay loop. As I - compelled by my unhealthy completionist obsession - completed the 36th episode and unlocked a previously-hidden 37th episode, I wondered if the game had showed me everything it had to offer...
...and I was surprised anew with a wholly fresh and new experience. Familiar yet also different from every chapter that came before, it culminated in a boss battle that felt supremely epic, intimidating and unfair, yet in a way that was actually not too difficult. And without spoiling anything, that actually made perfect narrative sense.
As the proverbial and literal curtains fell on my first game experience of the new year, I had to ask the million-dollar question I always ask of addictive games: did I feel like continuing to play even though I had 100%-ed it? The answer... is actually no. I'm a little burnt out on it actually, which is the reason I can't score it higher than a 4/5. But it's a strong enough game experience to be an easy recommend to anyone, and a fine way to kick off 2024. The (free!) DLC is going straight on my backlog.
I thought I'd kick off my thoughts with a look at a little detail: one of the more common status effects is called 'frozen dice', which for the next turn reduces the afflicted character's highest dice roll to a one, and it stacks. So if I get two dice frozen and roll 6 5 1, that hand becomes three ones, which can be extremely debilitating to some builds. Enter the Yeti, an enemy with a powerful attack that requires two ones to activate. Such a specific requirement means that you won't see that attack often at all... unless you freeze his dice, in which case good luck to you. It's little details like this that I adore - the usage of simple combat mechanics to represent more complex ideas, and in a more creative way than simply "Yeti is immune to ice attacks" is something that Dicey Dungeons excels at.
It's also dangerously addictive, being the latest in an exclusive list of games that have massacred my sleep schedule for week upon week. The vast array of available abilities as well as the many ways to create synergistic builds mean that this dice-rolling game has a deceptive amount of skill and strategy to go with its accessibility and charm. It also has what I consider a virtue among roguelikes - a very short run duration (simple episodes can be completed in under 20 minutes!) which keep play sessions bite-sized and ensure losing runs don't sting too much.
It does have its fair share of frustrations, though the chief one (the extremely luck-based nature of combat) is definitely deliberate; it certainly fits thematically with the premise of hapless player-characters fumbling through a rigged gameshow run by an avatar of Luck. Some other frustrations can be reasonably classified as 'flaws' though. The balance is somewhat wonky, with some enemies being way overpowered and some skills massively out-usefulling others. The game's UI sometimes withholds relevant information - as an example, you get a full heal upon level up so you might want to play more conservatively if you're about to level up to perhaps save your limit break for the next fight... but while your exp bar is shown outside of battle, it isn't shown in-battle so it's easy to forget how far away you are from the next level in the midst of combat. And while this sounds like a minor quibble, the fact is that you need to consistently make good decisions with all the information you have on hand because so much else is out of your hands, and the game really should make all the relevant information readily available!
Also, despite the countless ways the game iterates upon its rulesets to stay fresh - six episodes for six characters for a total of 36 subtly different play experiences! - it did feel like my runs started to blend together after awhile because there wasn't quiiite enough variety in the gameplay loop. As I - compelled by my unhealthy completionist obsession - completed the 36th episode and unlocked a previously-hidden 37th episode, I wondered if the game had showed me everything it had to offer...
...and I was surprised anew with a wholly fresh and new experience. Familiar yet also different from every chapter that came before, it culminated in a boss battle that felt supremely epic, intimidating and unfair, yet in a way that was actually not too difficult. And without spoiling anything, that actually made perfect narrative sense.
As the proverbial and literal curtains fell on my first game experience of the new year, I had to ask the million-dollar question I always ask of addictive games: did I feel like continuing to play even though I had 100%-ed it? The answer... is actually no. I'm a little burnt out on it actually, which is the reason I can't score it higher than a 4/5. But it's a strong enough game experience to be an easy recommend to anyone, and a fine way to kick off 2024. The (free!) DLC is going straight on my backlog.