Dicey Dungeons

Once upon a time there lived a solo indie developer by the name of Terry Cavanagh, and over the course of the course of seventeen years he would develop several games. How many games you may ask? Go onto his wikipedia page and scroll down the list of titles he worked on. I’m being deadly serious. Internet search for him, click the link, and scroll. It’s more than the entire rest of the page. Cavanagh has made a lot of games, most of which were experimental ideas. I can tell without even having to look further into his history that Cavanagh is a creative person. Churning smaller scale projects that are easier to formulate and create rather than bigger scale ones. The video game industry has been under a lot of fire lately for how much money is poured into Triple A games. As much as I enjoy blockbusters like God of War: Ragnarok there is no reason for a video game to cost almost one hundred million dollars. This statement isn’t only just applied to video games. Same can be said about the film except now it’s worse and even more bloated. I am not much of a movie or film person. The reason why I don’t review shows and films is because my opinion can be easily condensed down to a simple yes or no. Good or bad. One of the two.

However, I do stay in touch with the latest hits thanks to critics and good friends, and the biggest failure of the film industry recently has to be The Electric State. An adaptation that cost literally about two hundred and seventy five dollars to produce. From what I’m told it’s boring, poorly written, none of the characters are likable, the basic premise has been done several times before, and the only thing really going for it is the CGI which should never be the selling point of a film. It also doesn’t help that it’s a Netflix exclusive film, so any money it could’ve made in theaters is non-existent. Okay, so some portion of my film critic side is showing but you kinda understand where I’m coming from. Movies and in my case video games are becoming too expensive now to make, and this brings a caveat of problems outside the quality of the product. One of the main issues being they’re taking too long to make. I don’t mind lengthy development times for games. Trying to follow-up and improve is difficult, and I’d rather have a good game rather than a rushed one. Going back to God of War: Ragnarok it took four years to make whereas the time to make the original God of War and God of War II was a two year gap. However, I respect how long it took to make because the end product was something that managed to improve perfection.

It may sound like I’m going off track, because I am and we’re about to loop this back on Terry. Cavanagh, as well as several indie developers, are a good example of how smaller projects are better than larger ones. Churning out unique ideas until one of them gets good enough reception or gels in your mind. Then expanding on that idea and pushing it to its utter limit. It’s a reason why Game Jams. Small devs make a product quickly, mess around with it, see if people like it, and explore more on the idea. It’s the reason why Rollerdrome and Baba is You exist. Cavangh made several games throughout his time as a game dev and still continues too, but three games stand out as. The ones he’s made purchasable on Steam. VVVVVV, a challenging 2D platformer all about changing gravity. Super Hexagon, an addictive game about avoiding attacks in a hex. Then there’s Dicey Dungeons, a deckbuilding roguelike with the main gimmick being luck. It’s the main topic of this review and one I’ve been debating whether to do or not for a while. You see I first played Dicey Dungeons last year when I picked it up on sale for three dollars. I really enjoyed the gameplay and wanted to keep going, but a few loss streaks made me lose patience and put the game down. A shame really, because I can tell I would’ve loved it if I stuck with it.

Been revisiting a few games I dropped in the past and I decided to give Dicey Dungeons another go. Activated a modifier in the options menu to make the game easier, beat almost every single characters’ episodes, defeated the final boss, and rolled credits. Amongst all the games I have given a second chance Dicey Dungeons is probably my favorite of the bunch. It takes what can be considered a simple combat loop and mechanics, and expands them in such ways that I found myself addicted for the twenty hours I spent playing this near masterpiece of a roguelike. It has quickly risen into being one of the best roguelikes/deckbuilders I’ve ever played. I might even like it more Slay The Spire, and that’s surely a statement that’ll get me killed in a couple places. I will say though Dicey Dungeons is not a game for everyone. I may have beaten it now, but can understand why I dropped it initially. If you are unable to accept the gimmicks and moments of bullsh*t the game casually hands down then you are not going to have a fun time with the game. Crapping on it is not the point of this review. Point is to shine light on an underrated gem, and Dicey Dungeons made me do something I never do for the games I play: Understand how it’s programmed. Let’s talk about Dicey Dungeons and why it deserves your attention.

Story

The plot is quite simple to be frank with you. One of five adventurers journeys into a dungeon after hearing those who are able to brave it can have their deepest desires brought to life. Their wish can be granted, and the hopes of a brighter tomorrow lies close. This may sound like some real Dungeon Meshi-esque shenanigans right now. Which I watched midway last year and quite happily enjoyed. Can’t wait fo- Anyways, it turns out the dungeon isn’t your stereotypical cursed lair and is instead a game show. A stage where contestants will be tested on their fighting skills and ability to navigate several rooms. All to get further into the show and become its crowning star. The show is hosted by none other than Lady Luck, and she has prepared carefully for the folks who stand before her today. A determined warrior, diligent thief, nerdy engineer, a robot, and a witch wanting to become famous. She wants this show to be perfect. Organizing her many minions, making sure each floor is clean, and using her magical powers to transform each of the contestants into cute dicey versions of themselves. The goal from here is simple. Battle your way through each episode, and defeat the boss at the end to progress further into the game show. Yet, something is amiss. You slowly realize Lady Luck is rigging the game. Making it so the small chance of you winning doesn’t exist at all. It’s all a ruse to keep you trapped here forever, and the course of action going forth is to escape rather than. Luck be a lady tonight. 

No, wait, she is. 

Gameplay

Being a roguelike, your goal is to reach the end of every episode. This is done by fighting your way through five floors each filled with a handful of enemies. Collecting gear and upgrades to make your character stronger as well as leveling up. Facing a boss on the sixth floor and trying to defeat them. Dying leads to a game over as well as losing everything you’ve earned up until the point you died. It’s a roguelike, so each run will see you acquiring different gear, not fighting the same enemies from or at least not in the same order, and the layouts of each floor will change. Rather than follow the traditional roguelike design of having one long run you must finish you instead have episodes. There are six characters to play as and new ones are unlocked by getting far enough into each characters’ journeys. Each character functions differently and you’re gonna want to learn their gimmicks if you want to survive long enough. With later characters unlocked being more mechanically complex and harder to master than the earlier ones. I recommend just focusing on the easier ones first, knocking out their six episodes, and moving onto the next one. However, you do have the option to tackle them in any order you want which I appreciate.

Here’s how each character functions. The Warrior is basic. Your typical fighter in all of the RPGs you’ve played before. Hack, slash, defend, and do as much damage as you want. The Thief is a bit similar, but in some of his episodes he has the ability to steal or borrow equipment from foes. Allowing him access to skills you’d normally wouldn’t find in chests or gain from leveling up. This is done because his base skills at the start of each chapter are quite restrictive compared to the other characters, so you’re encouraged to grab new stuff. The Robot is where things get more complicated. He has a bar and this bar allows him to generate dice. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention you use dice to perform actions. Each character has a certain amount of dice they roll and you can roll from one to six. Spend dice on the cards you have, but some cards have restrictions. Like wanting only even numbered dice, a number below a certain value, vice versa, or two dice. This means you have to spend your dice wisely, so you can’t do exactly what you want each turn. You have to make due, and on some occasions pray that luck will be on your side. Going back to the characters, the Robot has a bar with a set value. Press a button and generate a number dice. Get a five then five points will fill the bar.Keep generating dice, but when you’re near the limit one of two things will happen. You generate the max bar value perfectly and get a potluck, which lets you do one of three skills, or don’t and watch all your skills malfunction.

The Engineer can forge new equipment at the end of every battle. However, she’ll scrap previous equipment to make room for new stuff and that’s why you have to carefully consider what you want. The Witch can bring up one of six spells by spending dice on her spellbook, but this is only possible if you assign cards to each slot. Finally there’s the Jester who functions like your typical deck builder character. Starting out with a deck each run, working through shuffled cards, and being able to attack as much as they want as long as cards are available and they get the needed dice values. Enemies come in a wide range of flavors with no single  enemy being fought more than once. They all have distinct quirks, strengths, and weaknesses and you have to either brave them or succumb. Each run you’ll learn more of how they work or overcome the problems set before you. Making use of elemental damages they’re weak to or swapping out cards before the start of every battle. Do this, get to the boss, defeat the boss, and move onto the next episode. Later episodes will start applying rules and challenges you have to work around making future runs more difficult. That’s all I really have to say about Dicey Dungeons. It’s a simple concept explored deeply thanks to its characters, their gimmicks, and how runs can play out. And now, the end is near. And so I face the final curtain. My frie- you can tell I like Frank Sinatra.

Thoughts

What the dog doing!?

Dicey Dungeons is an amazing roguelike deckbuilder I’m glad I stuck around for. The game is jam packed full of clever and interesting ideas, and it does this with just a few basic mechanics. Again, I will say that this game will not be for everyone. Looking back I understand why I quit playing this a year ago, and some players will find the game’s approach to challenge & difficulty curves to be frustrating. The game is entirely built around the idea of luck. Roguelikes already rely on heavy amounts of procedural generation and random gear drops. To make a game where the output and quality of your attacks is determined by dice rolls somewhat removes any player control or mastery they could have in a majority of roguelikes. Sometimes you get a bad roll, or the enemy somehow rolls a dozen large number dice quickly turning the tide of a fight. It’s a title that’s not afraid to pull out bullsh*t moments on the player easily, and this is why I quit it a year ago. This time around I made use of a difficulty modifier that reduces the amount of health and damage output of enemies. Making fights more manageable and less stressful. You also have the option to modify your progress. Allowing you to skip episodes and characters bothering you too much. Now this does mean you can ignore half the game, but it’s a choice. As the Doom Twitter account once said, “You control the buttons you press.”

However, I find Dicey Dungeons to be a more accessible and easier roguelike compared to most titles in the genre. Mainly because the mechanics are simple, and once you play enough runs you begin to learn the only way to get through is to cheat yourself. Make due with what you have and forge a build that absolutely demolishes everything in your path. Here’s an example of what I’m trying to explain. One of the many episodes with the Thief follows a gimmick where each turn the value of every dice goes up. Every dice is one, then two, all the way to six, and then it resets back to one. However, the highest damage card you start with has a max input of three and of the same number. Meaning you won't attack often or in small portions. However, I started to form a strategy with the cards I got. One card allows me to split a dice value. So six becomes two three number dice, or five and one, etc. Upgrade that and now I could split the number easily. Then get a card that increases a dice value by one. Then get a card that duplicates dice. Then I obtained a card that completely broke the run. A card that converts one of the other dice you have to the one you input into the card. Then upgrade that so you can repeat this several times. Meaning I could make a three, turn three more dice into three, and gain maximum damage.

This is probably my favorite part of Dicey Dungeons. Learning what works, what doesn’t, how to break it, and overcome the difficulty curves in front of you. I did however rely on a cheat. If you quit the game while a battle is going on you can load a save from before the battle. Letting you reattempt as many times you like. This does remove the part of having to learn or make due, but I’m glad they haven’t removed this. Sometimes luck really is what carries you forward, and even though it can bite you in the ass it’s exciting when you’re dealt a lucky hand in this game. Getting exactly what you need during a desperate moment, turning the tides, and pushing forth to the next goal. It’s a numbers game, but I love number games and this treats numbers brilliantly without becoming too confusing. I love the different characters you have available to play as and the many scenarios you go through. Lots of variety for each run.. However, some characters are gonna be more fun to play than others. My favorites were the Jesters and the Robot. One is a deckbuilding character and the other is a numbers game pushed to the brink. The others are basic or just hard to wrap your head around. I did not have fun playing the Witch, and after completing two episodes with her I decided to edit my progress and skip her entire journey.

I want to explain the finale of Dicey Dungeons, because it’s the highest point of the game both in terms of design and scale. I’m gonna let you guys play it through yourself if you decide to give the game a go, because it’s great. Runs are tight so they don’t go on too long, and the episode structure leads to satisfying progress that leaves you begging for more rather than discouraged. Other aspects of Dicey Dungeons love include the art style which is going to be a major selling point for players. A majority of roguelikes I’ve played have either been bleak or grim unless you’re Hades, Going Under, or Slay The Spire. Everything here is bright, colorful, cheerful, funny, and charming and I just want to hug the dice for how stubby and adorable they are! Sorry, I gotta contain myself. The music is perfect for a game trying to imitate the feeling of a fancy game show. The writing is funny despite there not being a lot of it, and the game is just the pure definition of fun. It wants you to have fun. It treats itself as fun. It’s checking up on you to make sure you’re doing alright. It’s fun and that’s why I kept playing the game despite some minor flaws and moments that would’ve normally made me rage quit and give it an average score.

Now onto the interesting part of this review. A statement I said near the beginning, “I may know how exactly they programmed this game.” I’m studying to become an engineer and during the first few years of college I took quite a few programming classes. I learned how to program in C-Code and Java. In these classes I learned to manipulate integers and variables. Basically values to anyone who hasn’t taken a programming class. You can store these values as either doubles or separated ints. Give them names so you can keep track of where they are. Have a bank of all you have stored. Then send them through functions, print them out, have them affect each other, and so on. Have numbers subtract, add, multiply, divide, carry by the power of whatever, have them randomly generate, and so on. I messed around a lot with numbers in my programming classes, and some of my projects involved me programming games. One was a visual novel where I had a hidden timer that adds up. Determining the different endings you could get. The other was an adventure game where you have to grab tokens to progress. With names referencing the playable characters in the Octopath Traveler series. Simple games, but I had fun making them.

The more I played Dicey Dungeons the more I understood how it was made. More specifically how the combat was made. Cards being given input and outputting the given values. Some cards require even or odd numbers, so you do an if statement featuring “%2” which detects whether the number gives a full answer or one featuring fractions when dividing by two. The dice being your ints, and the ints being randomly generated between one and six. Changing the ints if they are plugged into a value altering card, or changing the output off a card if the card has a specific number for an output. Sending output to enemy health and ticking it down, and the same goes for you. Here’s where I’m trying to go with this. I always wanted to make a video game. My dream since middle school was to create art, but seeing how the world is, it's either not stable enough as a job or takes too much time. For a few months now I’ve been in a depressive state. Realizing I will never be able to do what I dream. That I’m stuck being this person I don’t want to be. Then I played this game and not only realized the career I’m studying for helped me understand it, but that I have some knowledge of how somebody designs and develops a video game.

Dicey Dungeons affected me in a personal way. It’s not the deepest or emotionally impactful title I’ve tried, but it inspired me. As I said near the beginning of this review smaller projects can be better than big scale titles, because it allows developers to experiment quickly without wasting too much time or money. Dicey Dungeons is the perfect example of this in action, and realizing how it was made gave me the inspiration to keep going. To go through with my program and succeed at the end. Maybe I can make a video game even if it’s not too complex. Maybe I’ll make a simple turn-based game, a visual novel, puzzle game, etc. Something simple, but it’ll be a good start. Aside from this, in the end Dicey Dungeons is an amazing roguelike deckbuilder. One of my favorites in the genre, and if I were to make a top five right now it curently sits in the fourth spot between both Dead Cells and SLay The Spire. Yes, I am saying I enjoyed it more than Slay The Spire. Fight me if you want. I don't care. It's my personal preference and you'll have to deal with it. The game has simple yet creative mechanics, good enough variety, charm and wit to keep you playing even after the credits roll. I give Dicey Dungeons a 9.5/10 for being superb.

Thanks for reading. I just want to leave an extra note before I properly end this review. A lot of my game reviews as of recently have been really positive, but it's because I have more fun talking about things I enjoy rather than complain. We have too much negativity in this world and I think we need more of it. That and complaining requires too much mental energy. I'm a college student and as of writing I have a series of exams I need to study for the upcoming weeks. Reviews are less compared to last year and expect me to be quiet for the next month or so. I do enjoy writing, so maybe stay tuned for what I possibly have in store next. Got a couple games planned for the future, and maybe I'll finally get around to playing both Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 Reload. One of which I've been putting off for almost five years now. Who knows. You'll just have to hope my friends. Cheers & goodbye.

9.5/10, Superb