Love a lot about this game, and was very excited to play it when it first came out (I was hoping for a worthy successor to Slay the Spire, which this game is clearly a descendant of.)

The good: everything about the presentation! The shtick of a game show is great; the audio and visual is incredible. The first couple runs were really really fun, and the different characters had a great swath of flavor & difficulty to them.

Unfortunately, there’s just not as much meat on the bone as there is in Slay the Spire. Slay the Spire has an intricate patchwork of cards, items, and encounters that form a brilliant lattice of interactions & strategies, such that your understanding of the game scales pretty well with the difficulty; Dicey Dungeons’ state space of mechanisms is, frankly, pretty limited, such that once you get to the harder difficulties either you luck into the items you need to win or you don’t.

I lost interest fairly quickly and never actually completed the plot. I don’t regret playing it; I could see myself coming back to it one day; but the key to a good roguelike is a system that rewards and deeply leans into subtle variety, and Dicey Dungeons just doesn’t have that.

★★