Dice People

Genre: Strategy

Players: 1

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Review:

Dice People, released in 2025 on PC and Nintendo Switch, is a… I’m gonna’ call it a “Strategy” game, I guess. Though it’s not much like any other game I’ve encountered.

The idea here is that you’re presented with a screen full of scenery that gradually fills up with odd creatures passing through, and you’re placing dice that act as temporary Tower Defense style structures that damage anything within range of them for a brief period of time before disappearing. Structures and creatures destroyed by these attacks leave resources that can be collected, and once you’ve expended your supply of dice, you can spend those resources to upgrade your dice before heading back in to try again.

In a way, this works like many “Roguelites” do, with you completing runs, powering up, and then heading back for a new run with your enhanced abilities. However, this game lacks classic Roguelike elements like random power-ups and finding upgrade synergies. You’re just going through a cycle of power-up, do a run, power-up, do a run, and so on.

There are a few problems here. The obvious one is how little interaction you have with the gameplay. You just place the dice, and then watch things unfold. With upgrades, you can re-roll a few dice for better results, but that’s it when you’re in a run. Beyond that, you’re selecting upgrades from menus, but that’s it. In addition, progression is very slow here, at least in the early part of the game, and it will be quite some time before you can make significant progress on upgrading to the point where you notice a real difference. Also, given how much of the game has you interacting with it via an on-screen cursor, the cursor’s sluggish speed is a real drag on the game. Finally, the in-game menu for “Rewards” that give you bonuses for meeting specific goals is broken and won’t let you scroll down to see anything past the first screen.

The curious thing is that once you get past the initial sluggish part of the game, things do pick up, but then you trade one problem for another – instead of the problem being slow progress, it’s that there’s so much happening on-screen at once that it becomes mindless chaos. To be fair, there is some enjoyment is the massive level of action you’re unleashing on the screen and the resources you start amassing, but it comes with a level of detachment, because at that point you’re just sorta’ watching it happening.

Apart from the volume of activity onscreen, the 2D pixel art visuals that make up the presentation in this game are pretty bland and uninteresting-looking, backed by a subdued soundtrack. I suppose it all gets the job done, but there’s nothing here that’s particularly noteworthy.

In the end, I found myself very underwhelmed by Dice People. I appreciate how this game is doing something fairly unique and original, but it does so with slow progression, sluggish controls, and minimal interactivity. Also, the inflated price on Nintendo Switch (at $10, it’s over three times the cost of the PC version), makes this a game you won’t want to get unless it’s on sale. And even when it does go on sale, I think only the more patient players will appreciate it.

tl;dr – Dice People is an odd game that’s a bit like a Strategy game, where players place dice in a screen full of structures and enemies, where the dice will damage things in range to get resources, which you can use between runs to upgrade and try again. It’s fairly unique, but unfortunately progression is absurdly slow early into the game, there’s not much interactivity, and the on-screen cursor you use to control the game is also frustratingly slow. And on top of this, the Nintendo Switch version is woefully overpriced and has broken menus. Once this game gets going, it can be enjoyable, but only more patient players will get to that point before losing interest.

Grade: C

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