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The central principle of Dicey Dungeons, the legendary new dice burner of the famous developer Terry Cavanagh (VVVVVV, Super Hexagon) is that you are a person who walks, speaks and plays in a twisted game show in which you have to make your way endlessly into a constantly changing dungeon, in a desperate attempt to win your freedom. This freedom, of course, will never come.
Aside from the whole concept of "sensible death in a game show", this is a rather appropriate metaphor for my experience with the highly addictive genre of modern roguelike (or "roguelite", depending on how modesty you want to get). I have spent a lot of hours frankly troubling at games like The link of Isaac Dead cells, and Kill the arrow, the latter that you can hear used in the descriptions of Dicey Dungeons. This is not a totally indefensible comparison – they feel similar in some ways – but the games are ultimately very different.
Kill the arrow has combined the mechanics of deck construction, famous for its board games, to addiction "just one last run" of a spooky dungeon robot to create, according to this author 's estimate, a game damn close to perfection. Dicey Dungeons drunk Kill the arrowThe general setting of the group is to navigate around a branch card to take part in permadeath battles against monsters, turn by turn, but instead of building a deck of cards throughout the game, you gather a set six-sided dice.
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Each series begins with the host of the series, Lady Luck, who makes fun of your eternal situation.
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A floor plan. The different characters are enemies, the apples restore health, the treasure chest gives you equipment, the trolley is a shop and, on the left, you can see the door of the next floor.
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The starting equipment of the warrior. Put a die on a box to do what is written.
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You have room for six devices in your active slots, or three large pieces of equipment (or any combination that you can adapt).
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A little further in a race.
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Higher level to improve your health.
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Get new equipment in the treasure chests.
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Stores are another source of equipment.
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The spell book of the witch.
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An allergic porcupine shoots you when he sneezes.
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Work on achievements.
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Sometimes you have the choice between a reward.
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Upgrade the equipment at the forge.
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Episodes inject new rules and mechanisms into a race.
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After five floors, you face one of the game's bosses.
Roll bones
The game rolls your dice for you at the beginning of each turn – you start each round by two, but you get more and more as you progress – and you can then assign your dice to your equipment as you wish. The starting character, the warrior, begins each game with a sword, allowing you to inflict damage equal to the numeric value of the die placed there. The Warrior also gets a "fight combat" ability that allows you to make three re-raises (it is, after all, the starting character).
Soon, however, you will get a more interesting kit, like "Toxic Ooze," which deals damage equal to the number of dice, but if that number is a 6, you can also put two poison stacks on the enemy. Boomerang deals damage to the enemy equal to twice the die value, but then hits you for damage of a single value. Some equipment requires a certain number of digits ("less than 5" or "at least 3"), some require a certain threshold (a 10 requires of course several dice to be triggered), and some allow you to simply manipulate your dice ( hit one die, flip it 1, divide it in half, etc.).
Equipment boxes are unfortunately a little bland; it would have been nice to see small thematic illustrations so that the sword looks like a sword instead of a generic box with "sword" written on top.
Each of the six characters in the game (warrior, thief, robot, inventor, witch and secret character) has its own extremely different choice of starting equipment and character-specific equipment, as well as a power special "break limit" that can be triggered when you have sustained enough damage. The warrior focuses on spectacular big attacks, while the thief has access to small, repeatable strikes. Some characters even have a very unique mechanics. The robot allows you to roll as many dice as you want, but if you move over your target number, you immediately lose your turn (hit the target to trigger a bonus action "jackpot"). The inventor deconstructs an active piece of equipment after each battle to give it a special bonus ability for the next battle, and the witch must build a spellbook to use during the battle.
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The warrior is your standard star character – big attacks, and his special power can double them. (I've censored the super secret unlockable character in this gallery.)
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The thief focuses on smaller attacks and can fly the enemy's equipment in the air. (Once, I used the ability to "turn into a bear" of an enemy and became a bear for the rest of the race.)
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With the robot, you can roll as many dice as you want, but be careful not to roll on your target number. Tap on the target number to trigger a jackpot.
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The inventor deconstructs a piece of equipment after each fight to create a special ability that can be used in the next fight.
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The witch has a spell book with six locations, one for each die face.
Your backpack may contain a generous amount of gear, but your active gear (which you can trade at will between battles) is limited to six "slots". Some more powerful equipment uses two slots, so you're better off. Constantly reevaluate which equipment works best depending on the specific monster you are going to face. Of course, monsters have their own specialized equipment and fight in the same way.
In a game like Kill the arrow, building your deck is half the battle. The "bridge building" aspect of Dicey Dungeons– Assemble your equipment in charge – is important, but it is the turn-based tactical game in which you will do most of your thinking. There is a certain amount of luck inherent in any dice game, but the randomness here seems right. Of course, there are cases where you simply do not do the number you need, but there are also many ways to expand your load to make sure you have a range of options. equipment allowing you to use any dice result. There are also ways to manipulate the results of the dice, and you can even "cheat" the system to get free dice and perform complicated maneuvers (if you "split" a 1, you get two 1s or you can get a 6 get a 6 and an extra 1, etc.). Each round, the game offers you a random assortment of dice results and asks you to use them as efficiently as possible.
Aggressively fizzing
Unlike the sad premise of the game, Donjon DiceyWe could probably call the aesthetic "aggressive bubble". The sinister darkness, standard of genre, is replaced here by bright colors, original characters and a soundtrack of chiptune truly bangin. Vanquished foes are not left in a puddle of their own viscera; they are just beaten for the day, and they send you along your way with a cute little one. The enemies themselves are undeniably charming: there is everything from an inflamed marshmallow that fires fireballs to an allergic porcupine who (maybe accidentally) throws buns whenever it's over. He sneezes.
As for the difficulties, I was rather worried when I beat my first run of the game and that I accelerated the process of unlocking the characters with very little hindsight. It is the fierce commitment of the roguelike genre in the overwhelming difficulty that gives its games an almost infinite replayability. But the standard game is essentially a tutorial, a way to help you get acquainted with the unique mechanics and equipment of each character. Once you have unlocked all the characters, you unlock "episodes", which are the essential meeting point of the game.
There are six episodes for each character – the first is just the standard game, and each of the others adds a touch or a new mechanic to the character's repertoire. For example, in a standard game of Episode 1, the thief steals a piece of equipment at random each turn. In episode 2, the thief can steal equipment permanently by investing dice. In episode 3, the thief gets all 1 of the first turn, the 2 of the second turn, and so on. The "pause limit" special powers of the characters are also different in each episode, and some of the more complex characters have really wacky modifiers to get things moving. When I unlocked the episodes, my enthusiasm for the game went from "yeah, it's pretty cool" to "I will not rest until I've finished everything in this game ". Most episodes give you new abilities to play and problems to solve, making sure that a character from "Episode 1" and a character from "Episode 2" feel almost like totally different classes. The episodes are also more difficult than the standard game.
Do not expect the intense theory of a more complex game here; there is no deep interaction between cards, trinkets, consumables and other mechanisms as you will see in Kill the arrow. But Dicey Dungeons does what he proposes to do: provides a fairly moguelike realistic strategy game – certainly much sweeter on the ramp than many of his fellow countrymen.
More importantly, it's very entertaining. Once again, I'm stuck in the dungeon.
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