ATICO’s Die in the Dungeon is a dice-based roguelite that leans heavily on its core dice system for its endorphins. Pick your frog and their pile of starter dice to slay the bugs in your way through three stages of ramping power and difficulty. The game lives or dies based on its core system; I’ll show you what I mean.
There’s a roguelike formula that, if I start listing features, you’ll probably get a feel for it, but what sets Die in the Dungeon apart is the move you’ll make every combat round: placing rolled dice on a grid to activate abilities.
The amount you can use and what they can do varies, but the basic setup is that a character has a bunch of slots in a board where you place the dice you rolled. Individual dice block damage, inflict it, heal, boost other dice, among other effects.
Where you place a die in the grid can increase the effect, and the board state can change to modify values or require placement in certain spots to avoid empowering the enemy.
Whatever other games in this subgenre do, Die in the Dungeon gives you a puzzle every round to solve, and it can often be fun to optimise.
The dice too are worth mentioning, because you are often in control of what values the (four-, six-, and eight-sided) dice have, allowing for a spread of numbers or perhaps all the same moderate value. They can have modifiers that inflict poison on the enemy, or boost their value when near other dice, have reduced action point cost, and plenty of other enhancements.
Many, such as most heals, are “glass”, which means you can usually only use it once per encounter, and some types can duplicate or transform effects.
As you might expect, rolling dice means you’re sometimes going to come up all ones (or zeroes, depending on the spread!) and you might be handed a defeat if you don’t have abilities to counter this. However, it can be satisfying to avoid destruction for just one more round through a clever play.
Each character you can choose has its own board you can play your dice on, which can allow for different strategies, often affecting duplication and boosting, and their basic dice and starting artefact lead to different play styles. One ripostes with blocking, another poisons, and the starter is more of a balanced damage dealer.
The artefacts, single-use potions, and enhancements you gain help reduce the odds of failure (sometimes incrementally, since you roll dice for potion effects as well). There are achievements, plenty of things to unlock (including the characters, to start), and an endless dungeon mode should you want to jog beside Sisyphus for a spell.
There are events, some of which require skill rolls which you may or may not be able to get, but can add some nice variation beyond direct combat. The monster variety is fair, but each group affects things enough that few battles are just against bags of hit points, and they often affect your board or make interesting choices for who to attack, when to hold back, and what dice to choose.
The game’s longevity with you will be heavily dependent on whether you like the core mechanisms, and if the unlocks and increasing difficulty modifiers are enough to keep you returning to the dungeon. However, it’s refreshing to play a game that takes its dice mechanisms seriously enough that you feel like individual situations with monsters and the resources you have to fight them are nice, individual puzzles. The Classic version can be found on Itch.io if you want to try it out
-AHoodedFigure
Die in the Dungeon is out now on PC (Mac, Win).
