Source: Supporter copy
Price: £11.39 (Soundtrack £5.19)
Where To Get It: Steam, Itch.IO

When you can build an entire, multifaceted procgen RPG out of dice, you pretty much know you’ve got it in the bag. And Dicey Dungeons is… Exactly that. It’s a game where yes, there are only D6s involved, but those dice? They go a long way, and are used in cool ways. Let’s get into this.

So, the story is pretty simple: Several adventurers are participating in a game show run by Lady Luck herself. A deadly game show, in which the winners take home a prize of their choosing (Disclaimer: Prize may in fact be an asshole genie wish), and the losers? Well, they get either death, or a lifetime of servitude in Lady Luck’s dungeon game show. Aesthetically, it’s got a great cartoony style, some synth beats that, to put it bluntly, fucking slap (Yes, technical term), and everything is very clear and understandable. Nice.

Mechanically? Well, let’s pick a few examples, both among equipment and characters. The game starts with the Warrior, who gets three rerolls a turn. This, honestly, isn’t bad. But I’ve had a lot more fun with the Robot, whose gimmick is that they don’t actually have a set number of dice, only a total they can’t roll above, their CPU count. Roll above it, and all abilities you have left become useless, Roll exactly on your CPU, and you get one of three special abilities in addition. It’s a tense game of chicken with the dice, and I love it. Especially since there are items, unique to the robot, that can play with both CPU count and the jackpot range, and one item in particular, the Ultima Sword, does double damage on a jackpot.

Meanwhile, there are abilities that seem useless unless upgraded (and even then, some aren’t great.) But, with certain other items, they become more useful, and, with the Inventor, whose gimmick is they have to destroy at least one item (more on that in a sec) for their special ability each combat, they’re a damn good way of keeping what you want to keep.

Anyway, each character’s arc is divided into 6 “episodes”, and only the first is the default experience. After that, Lady Luck starts introducing gimmicks. Nasty gimmicks that fit her charmingly mean spirited demeanour, like the Inventor having to destroy more items (but getting more in return), or doubles being destroyed (making certain items completely useless, and possibly doing you out of certain results you want.) Thankfully, each character is introduced whether you win or lose a run, and the further episodes are unlocked once you’ve got the hang of the five main characters (there is a sixth, but… Well, spoilers)

I wouldn’t really say the game is endlessly replayable, but, honestly, it doesn’t have to be. It’s got a lot of content, it’s easy to learn and middling to master, and its colourful cast, writing, and aesthetics are enjoyable as hell. Definitely worth giving a go, and I would say that this is one of those good first introductions to RPGs with some procgen content (Y’know, roguesortakindamaybelikes.)

The Mad Welshman would probably make a great D6. Would be hard to read black numbers on a black dice though. Ehehehe.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £18.99
Where To Get It: Steam
Other Reviews: Early Access 1

When you can tell a release candidate is a big step up from its Early Access, it’s not only a pleasant feeling, it’s a relief. A game you can point to and say “Nice, I enjoyed this!” And Oxygen Not Included, having rebalanced and added More Stuff to the usual Klei brand of “Games I Love, But Seem To Dislike Me (While Being Enjoyable To Play)”, is definitely one of those kinds of games. What interests me most about it is that it also retains that feeling of a slow fight of attrition against a difficult situation (Being trapped in the middle of an asteroid, with Oxygen in limited supply, and the means of making it in potentially limited supply, and… Look, there’s a lot of things I could affix “In limited supply” or “Of limited effectiveness” to, from food to water to power, and beyond.

But it’s not insurmountable, although it definitely feels that way in the early game sometimes, and the game rewards you for that struggle, that fight for survival, with cool things to find, and more information about why you, for some reason, are squeaking, honking clones, finding yourself in a tiny space at first, with absolutely no context beyond “Hey, you’ll die if you don’t work at the whole staying alive thing! Chop chop!”

And a part of what it’s added, although part of that may well be me having gotten better at things (With the exception of wiring… Le sigh) is that you get to see it more, before it starts pulling the gloves off. And, for players who want a challenge, or just a change, there are several different types of asteroids to be trapped in, from your bog standards, to your boggy standards, all the way to “Oh heck, why did someone even do this, putting us in this hellhole to die?”

Now, overall, it’s indirect management. I can’t say all of it’s good (It still, oddly, has the speed settings as a sort of throttle, so to go from “somewhat fast” to “normal” is two taps, but I can somewhat forgive that, especially as the sleep period seems to go by quicker), and reading tooltips is a must, but… Scalable UI. That’s good. Clear fonts. Cool. And very little that seemed to affect colourblindness, with the tooltips aiding in letting me know “This is coal, this is granite, and this is a chlorine filled mess you’ll probably have to go into with insufficient protection, because there’s useful things here. Hope your air plan is gooood, LOL!” Finally, there’s been some streamlining. Research is more clearly delineated, and levelling up a Duplicant is now at the base duplicator, rather than a thing requiring its own research. Nice!

And it’s these things, these seemingly small (But actually kind of big) changes that make the game friendlier, without, obviously, being too friendly. You’ll still, eventually, have to do dangerous things, overstretch yourself, and bar some duplicants from using machinery just to cut down on their commute. And you’ll still, occasionally, be yelling at them, despite a priority system, to “Argh, fix that, fix that, you’re going to be in trouble if you don’t AAAARGH.”

But, for the most part, outside the really early game, that AARGH is a slower process, a process you can come back from, if you keep your head together. And, since Oxygen Not Included was already interesting and charming, not pretending to be anything other than it is, it remains highly recommended to fans of these indirect management survival games.

Just don’t come crying to me if your wiring overloads and starts a fire. Not least because I won’t be able to help you either.

No, really… The Mad Welshman sometimes has trouble remembering whether CHA FAN is a usable motherboard socket for… A fan. Don’t ask him about wiring.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £4.99 (£1.69 for soundtrack)
Where To Get It: Steam

What if you were not, in fact, the hero, but some random jackass chosen to wield a magical sword? Such is the question asked by Reventure, and the answer is: You die. A lot. Sometimes entertainingly, sometimes anticlimactically. And this, funnily enough, is the whole point: A collectathon of endings.

To say that mileage will vary on this one is… Kind of an understatement. After all, we’ve seen obscure game endings, some of us have gotten those obscure game endings, and always, the question arises: Was that worth the effort to get it? By the time the obvious ones, involving the sword, Power of Love, and just dying to things had come and gone, I was apparently in the top thirtieth percentile of players. By where I am right now, where a lot of what I need to do involves either completing the game’s stated goal of saving the Princess in some fashion, finding obscure things, and the like, I am top 10% of people who bought it already.

Since this is kinda the core deal, it’s important to note, because, aesthetically, the game can shine as much as it wants, and it kind of does, with highly Zelda reminiscent tunage, some amusing writing (“Wait, ignore the heroic music, don’t go past the checkpoint without a weapon!”), and a solid tiled pixel aesthetic… But you’re going to be hearing that heroic music, the eerie temple and Dark Castle tunes, and seeing areas… A lot. And, later on, it’s going to be to the backdrop of “Shit, wait, shit, wait, where do I…?”

It’s basically about discovering things, and, funnily enough, one of the most amusing discoveries is that, for the majority of endings, our hero just… Won’t die. Crushed by a brick? With an “X time later” card, we come back to the house, to find… OH GOOD GOLLY… A boneless, flapping husk is now our player avatar. Eep. Zombies, pirates, even a Tingle… These form a component of its humour, and I definitely appreciate the variety. The other feature of the game, in which Twitch streamers can let a person play the role of the hero verbally, is… Well, the mileage on that can vary quite widely too. I didn’t use that one, even though I know my community’s pretty solid.

Still, this is definitely a game that does what it’s trying to do. It’s trying to give that feeling of hunting obscure endings, of the variety of possibilities that, normally, we just cover with some generic game over, or a brief animatic. It even tries to give them the same sort of weight. But that sort of even weighting isn’t entirely do-able, simply due to the nature of the beast. Its humour mostly works, and, overall, I would recommend this to the completionist in my life, even with that final stretch being a bit tiresome to achieve.

The Mad Welshman is a Grumpy Completionist. He likes completing things, but never has the time…

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £9.99
Where to Get It: Steam

It is an oft-spoken truth that adventurers are in the biz to look fly. Well, secondary to the concern of being as murderous as humanly possible in the pursuit of loot and monsters, but yes, looking good while doing so is definitely a priority.

And Swag and Sorcery aptly demonstrates what hard, thankless grind this can be with its fashion obsessed kingdom, out to find a long-lost magical, kingly costume, and look swag as heck while doing so.

Oh, and there’s some dork trying to tear the kingdom down. I guess he’s kind of in the way, along with his summons. Something about thinking that the King relying on a magic suit his grandfather had to solve the Kingdom’s woes…

Swag and Sorcery, overall, is an idle RPG with crafting elements. Send your adventurers out into the wild (occasionally returning them to town so you get some loot, instead of no loot at all and an annoyed adventurer waiting to heal), get ingredients and money, and then throw those ingredients and money into the adventure supplying industries, so you can do that first bit all over again. And again. And again. Until you beat a boss, at which point, you get more areas to look at, unlock more ingredients for more recipes and…

…Look, it’s enjoyable with a certain mindset. Wanting to discover what new thing you encounter, what new costumes you get, and whether this time, this time, that damn priest judge won’t vote a 9 on that awful pumpkin number. I mean, it’s summer, pumpkin is fall, you ecclesiastical blunderer! There is, to be fair, a lot of this adventuring industry: Alchemy to make some rare ingredients and get mana for spells (used to help adventuring parties in trouble), smiths and carpenters to sort equipment, clothiers to help the wizarding types… All manned by… The same adventurers you’re hiring to clean out the dungeons. Heck, even sending multiple adventuring groups out at once is a thing you can quickly do.

Aesthetically, Swag and Sorcery is not bad at all. Good, clear pixel art, you know what things are, the music’s nice, and the roles that are voice acted are amusingly hammy. Which fits with the game’s silliness, so… Appreciated. Sure, some monsters are a little generic, but the majority are something interesting. Ghouls in this game, for example, are armoured murderbeasts, and the Infected are dead, weeping eyed humans who have been melded to what appears to be giant spikey crab legs.

But yes, Swag and Sorcery is all about, as with most idle type deals, getting bigger numbers, so you can hit bigger numbers, which gets you bigger numbers. Sometimes those numbers aren’t quite big enough, so you have to grind on the smaller numbers until you can get bigger numbers (or grind on the bigger numbers hoping to get something out of it while other numbers get lower.) And… It’s not unenjoyable, it definitely has its high points, but… Sadly, I’m not really of the mindset to properly enjoy it.

The Mad Welshman already ground out his reviewing stat this month. More grinding is… Inadvisable for him.

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Source: Cashmoneys
Price: £9.99
Where To Get It: Steam

Ah, the 16^th Century. Such a wondrous age, full of poets, of doctors finally starting to learn what the heck they’re on about, and, of course, the Plague. It is a wondrous age to which our dear leaders wish us to return, in the hope that perhaps the Empire might also coincidentally rise again.

Speaking of quacks… Astrologaster is a comedic tragedy, in the form of speechcraft and song (Often Madrigals) about a “Doctor” who used Astrology as his form of diagnosis, one Simon Forman. And, to be fair, he is a fitting subject, for he was tangenitally involved with… Well, a lot of London life of the period. The game takes liberties, but it does so to introduce quite a few other major players of the period, such as Sir Walter Raleigh’s circle, the Dean of Rochester, Thomas Blague (and his wife Alice), and Emilia Lanier, a poet, and suspected to have been the Dark Lady of William Shakespeare’s sonnets 127-154.

Yes, knowing this period of history helps with some of the jokes. But by no means all, for nearly everyone is mercilessly riffed on, excepting some folks whose lives… Really didn’t deserve that much mockery. In any case, a fair warning, the game does end rather suddenly, and the reason for this is that the good “Doctor” ended… Rather suddenly. But the aim is, through astrology (Or, more accurately, through a cunning combination of actually divining what’s wrong, and telling people what they want to hear), to diagnose folks’ complaints.

It’s very clear, in the sense that you know what’s what, even if the diagnoses are sometimes… Difficult, and the picturebook aesthetic works well. Where it really shines, though, is the aforementioned voice acting and singing. Jo Ashe does an excellent job of playing concerned wife Emma Sharpe (how do her older husbands keep dying on her?), for example, and the songs about Thomas Blague are wonderful examples of a new musical art form I would like to call “Getting owned by the Church Chorus.”

It’s… Honestly kind of hard to write about the charm of Astrologaster without either going on a history lecture, spoiling the results of some choices, or both, but… History buffs will get several laughs (and knowing nods), most folks will have a charming experience and quite a few laughs, and, overall… Yup, I like Astrologaster.

I cannot really Madrigal, but Iamb good with that Pentameter. Honest.

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