Dicey Dungeons is an amazing roguelike where you play a Dice adventurer going through a few floors of a dungeon, fighting enemies by throwing dice and using equipment via the numbers you’ve thrown, getting new stuff, improving it, using special character powers and limit breaks in order to overcome a wide array of colorful and sometimes tricky foes. A great game with really good music and mechanics, I had an absolute blast with it, even if I regretfully couldn’t stomach taking the time to do everything in the game.
The core idea is very simple; You go through multiple floors of a dungeon and mostly fight enemies that you’ll encounter around. In order to fight, you roll a few die, then try to use equipment you own in order to defeat these foes. These can be very simple, like inflicting damage equal to the dice roll you had, but they grow in complexity as you go further into the game. When you’re done rolling, enemies roll their die and do similar effects based on their own gear, usually thematically appropriate with the enemy itself. By taking damage you charge up a powerful “limit break” move that varies per character.
Equipment can be upgraded and managed - you can only fit a grid of 3 by 2, and gear is either two squares big or one square big - so you create your perfect deck through the course of a run, either by buying new stuff, finding it after a battle or via other means, sometimes you’ll get a really poor run where nothing works, so that can get a bit frustrating, but such is the nature of roguelikes. Upgrading it will mean better numbers, easier conditions to meet, a smaller space taken on the grid, and so forth. When you complete all the floors, you face with a boss that has a specific gimmick and if you have the right gear you get to spin a wheel, and lose.
Successful runs unlock new character classes - with their own set of gear, limit break, character power and gimmick - so each class plays very differently. The thief needs low rolls and can steal moves, the magician needs to prepare spells, the robot creates dice up to a limit, the inventor transforms equipment into gadgets, the list goes on. More successful runs unlock challenge runs for all classes, and they can be wildly different. Sometimes they’re not very fun, like the inventor one where your gear has limited uses and you can just get into unwinnable scenarios if everything breaks, which is very frustrating when that happens during the boss fight, which occurred to me maybe three times, but they are very creative and really turn the mechanics of the game around.
I don’t really want to say anything more about Dicey Dungeons. It is really good and addictive, and you probably should play it yourself. The core ideas are simple and easy to understand, but everything gets together to create an extremely replayable adventure where no two runs are exactly the same.
