an upper echelon "roguelike" that strikes me more as compact turn-based strategy With Roguelike Elements, although the more I play it the more apparent the roguelike aspects get. it functions best as a quick fix pick-up-and-play type of game that'll hook you for hours (or days in my case) a la Slay the Spire, one of its main influences and a game that I've never given a try yet. what pulls me into it as someone who can't get into cards and deckbuilders is how it utilizes dice instead for both parties, with your heroes capable of rerolling theirs for better options. fantastic combat system, the entire game is that combat system lol, with surprising levels of depth to really dig into. it's been out for years on itch.io (including a mobile version where it feels right at home!) but I'm glad it got another major update and a Steam release. it deserves more attention drawn to it, it's awesome!

I'm a real-time action enjoyer, at times borderline monkey brain button mash type stuff but I've been trying to move on past that. my preferred playstyle is calculated aggression. Slice & Dice manages to make tactical turn-based battles very appealing to my button mashing ass. thanks to the ingenious undo feature and the way turns play out, the best defense is often a good offense (as stated by the dev in the in-game tips) and I love it. being able to undo every action you make aside from rerolls is easily my favorite feature here, it's the perfect middle ground between trivialized difficulty and brutal punishment. this isn't a more complex traditional roguelike where you must commit to every decision you make to avoid death, so its inclusion is perfect. experimentation is encouraged and promotes learning its systems for you to make more informed decisions in the future; this is extended further with auto-healing between battles, another welcomed addition as always.

I'm also really fond of its "horizontal progression" as people seem to refer to it as nowadays. instead of accumulating upgrades between runs i.e. vertical progression, knowledge is power and the only thing stopping you besides unlucky RNG and a lack of knowledge is your own mistakes. I want to play these kinds of games for different build choices -- randomized ones in this case -- and on the fly decision-making, and Slice & Dice has both in spades. I love how much thought goes into your items, heroes, dice rolls, everything. for a game that seems one-note the potential ceiling for min-maxing is crazy, not to mention the optimization involved in each turn down to every single action you take. as a friend pointed out to me while discussing meta-progression, content is only locked in this game to allow the additional layers of depth to slowly reveal themselves; for once I don't have any real qualms with the achievement-based unlock system and would in fact say it's implemented very very well.

if you took a combat system this refined and built around it with that same level of quality you'd have something truly incredible, but that's not to say I find it lacking in any meaningful regard. it's a fantastic game as is, the only thing Slice & Dice possibly does wrong is.. I guess the fact that it's still a roguelike? the best way I can put it is that it's basically RNG: The Game, so those who dislike an excess focus on luck and randomness might feel a lot differently about it. to me it's one of its strengths yet it's not compelling enough for me to stick to it for longer periods without starting to feel aimless and fatigued, an issue which seems to persist across every roguelike/lite I've played thus far. usually I won't get enough out of extensively repeating a gameplay loop and achievement unlocks are no incentive either, but that's not a mark against this particular game. what matters is how it manages to pull me back in every so often to remind me just how much there is to love about it. ...except the sheer number of enemies with dice sides that summon MORE enemies - those are the bane of my existence. screw you Hexia and Wendigo.

any game that taps into my wanderlust so heavily that I'm freestyling my own shortcuts, discovering hidden areas, and (almost) getting out of bounds instantly gets a hearty plus from me. as an enjoyer of 3D games with open environments - including open worlds when they aren't suffering from being excessively long and padded collectathons or their other usual trappings - there's this deep internal satisfaction I get from it that not many other gaming moments can exceed. in fact very few games have ever managed to evoke that same explorative feeling, an important distinction to make when some of them are among my favorite games of all time, like Shadow of the Colossus and Elden Ring.

it goes without saying that the emergent exploration in this game was intuitive and really really good. no guides or maps or anything, just me experimenting with the mechanics until I found a way to get to the highest point of the largest room in Castle Sansa. sadly I was blocked by invisible walls so I couldn't get out of bounds but at least I could admire the view.

the lack of a map (at the time of reviewing) never bothered me until late into the game when I mistook the library for the keep and decided to look up entrances to the keep without wasting more time, and again after that to reenter the underbelly. interconnection is a neat concept, but the execution here usually felt like a lot of my effort resulted in just looping back around to somewhere I'd been before without even unlocking a useful shortcut. it was more and more underwhelming every time it kept happening because the awe would turn into "wait I've already been here" way too often.

I do kinda wish there was something more to Pseudoregalia, like some kind of a plot to add some depth and narrative purpose to our protagonist's adventure in this dream(?) world, anything really. yet part of its appeal is the fact that it almost feels like an incomplete idea. even without a fully realized combat system, which wasn't a problem to me as I wasn't playing it for that, it still manages to feel like something special through exploration, music, sound design, visual style and more. if you have any level of appreciation for Super Mario 64 or really any 3D platformers of old, it's a must play.

you walk over tiles on a grid, get stopped by battles on random tiles, leave to the next floor once you run over every tile, rinse and repeat. that's about it. battles are the ATB flavor of turn-based combat against what seems to be a preset enemy formation, selected at random. both parties have physical defense and magic defense to protect their HP, both defenses auto-regenerate after every battle, and magical attacks are free to cast rather than being tied to a resource. abilities are active and passive and use a resource by taking up a certain number of slots; you gain more slots by walking over as many tiles as possible. you have to start from 0 and make it all the way down to floor 99 with zero meaningful developments -- no dialogue, no overarching narrative, no characterization, nothing.

there's really not much to it and I still somehow found myself losing track of time as I played it. I'd say I enjoyed it to some extent, mainly as a change of pace from all the action games I've played, but after 4 hours I'm on floor 11 and I feel like it's just not worth my time or effort. I haven't had more than one party member die at a time so I've never truly felt challenged or pressured, particularly to the point of having to strategize whatsoever. I wouldn't be looking forward to a party wipe either, I've read that you have to find your downed party with your underleveled B squad so it's like pseudo-permadeath with tedious strings attached.

I can't be bothered grinding out the monotony just to find out if the game might get even remotely engaging. it's not gonna happen. at this point I play it a lot like I did with "survivor clones" where I mute the audio and listen to some of the many albums I've been meaning to get to... and I truly despise the idea of consuming several forms of media at once so that's not really saying much. I play video games to get absorbed in them and take in every element, mainly the music and sound in this case and the lack thereof, not to zone out and juggle my attention between the game and a TV show, movie, YouTube video, whatever it may be unless I'm grinding post-game content or an achievement in one of my favorite games or something. I just think that nonsense should be reserved for mundane chores and work, and games shouldn't be a chore to play like this one is.

in fact while I was playing it I couldn't help but draw vague similarities to Vampire Survivors. not as in it's another mindless stimulant; if I had to choose I'd pick this instead every time, although it is funny how different critical reception is between the two. what I mean is that it's another heavily distilled and barebones approach to genre conventions. where Vampire Survivors is like watching paint dry for ~30 minutes just to unlock other stuff and upgrade stats between runs, this game is all about the dungeon crawling without the theatrics, atmosphere, worldbuilding, narrative, etc etc. I know there's other dungeon crawlers with a similar design but nothing about this one managed to captivate me.

I don't outright dislike Dungeon Encounters but it's a hard sell even to someone that'd be into it. I kinda like how bold it is in its minimalism, I just can't justify the time investment given the shallowness. if I want to play a dungeon crawler I'll play a blobber or whatever. if I wanted to play a JRPG with less story and more gameplay I'd play something like SaGa, it's got plenty more mechanical depth. in a time where we're spoiled with so many great video games out there and plenty more to come, I fail to find a reason to see this one to the end.