Dicefolk

Genre: Turn-Based RPG / Roguelike

Players: 1

.

Review:

Dicefolk, released in 2024 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is a Turn-Based RPG Roguelike with a structure similar to Deck-Building takes on the genre like Slay the Spire, but instead of building up and managing a deck of cards, you’re building up and trading out your trio of “chimeras” (Pokemon-like monsters), and upgrading your set of dice that determine what moves they use. The result is something both familiar and wholly unique.

The presentation here isn’t too far off from Slay the Spire, with 2D characters and backgrounds with minimal animation, though there’s at least a decent amount of color and the character designs are nice, and each battle ends with a nice celebration animation by the game’s human protagonist. These visuals are joined by a pretty catchy soundtrack with some nice synthesizer and piano themes, including the Main Theme, The Meadow, The Canyon, and The Volcano.

Getting to the gameplay, the main focus here is the battles. In battles, your three monsters will face off against up to three opposing chimeras, though only one chimera on each team is the current leader and capable of actively using the attacks and abilities that come up on your dice rolls. By default, these dice can attack, allow the leader to gain a one-use shield against any attack, rotate your team to swap out the leader, or idle (which generally does nothing).

However, as you progress through a run you’ll be granted tiles to swap in for sides of the dice, enabling you to both improve them and make them better-suited to your team. Likewise, you’ll get the ability to grant your team with stat upgrades and equipment to further boost their abilities, in addition to their own innate abilities and stats. What’s more, you’ll also occasionally have a chance to swap in new chimeras that better suit your team, though you can only have three at a time so you’ll need to say goodbye to one of your current chimeras.

This is all well done, and passive abilities shake things up by automatically activating when you rotate your team or when some other specific thing happens. However, the really clever thing that this game does actually goes a step further than Slay the Spire.

Slay the Spire was one of the games that introduced an innovation to this genre that allowed players to see upcoming enemy attacks, but Dicefolk actually allows you to choose enemy attacks, letting you use them in the order that benefits you the most. In each turn, your attacks and enemy attacks are all laid out before you in each team’s dice, and it’s up to you to determine what order those dice play out. This means you can use your attacks to pick off a strong attacker before using opponents’ dice, or swap in one of the opponents’ monsters that you want to pick off early, or even set things up so the enemy targets your shielded chimera, making their attack harmless.

This isn’t to say that the game is easy, though – you need to activate all enemy attacks at some point, and there will certainly be times when you have to decide which of multiple bad options will be the least-damaging. And because this is a Roguelike, sometimes you’ll just have bad luck in a run and have monsters that just aren’t suited to the current battles you’re finding yourself in. Also, it’s not always clear how different abilities will combine, and whether a particular action will trigger another ability.

However, despite these occasional frustrations, Dicefolk is a highly-enjoyable and wonderfully original take on the Roguelike RPG genre, and fans of these sorts of games should absolutely consider adding this to their collection, as it’s not quite like anything else I’ve played in this genre.

tl;dr – Dicefolk is a Turn-Based RPG Roguelike game where players are managing a trio of monstrous “chimeras” as well as upgradeable dice that represent their potential moves in battle. There are some really clever game mechanics here, and while it’s not without its issues, overall this is an enjoyable and unique entry in the genre well worth playing.

Grade: B+

.

This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Winner:

Runner-Up: Best Roguelike, Best Card/Board/Dice Game

.

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}