#tann

Aatma Manthan Museum, Rajsamand District, Rajasthan, India,

Sanjay Puri Architects,

Slice & Dice 

Developed/Published by: Tann Released: 20/03/2024 Completed: 23/04/2024 Completion: Beat it once; played it a few more times. Trophies / Achievements: n/a 

I was recommend to play this, did and then, sad to say, forgot that I’d played it completely, which is a fairly bad sign. It still does deserve a write up, though!

Slice & Dice is, yes, yet another roguelike-like, but it’s a bit of a callback, because unlike everything else I’ve been playing recently, it’s got dice instead of cards (although, to be fair, Luck Be A Landlord was symbols on a slot machine). This is an enjoyable twist, because who doesn’t enjoy throwing dice? I certainly did when I was doing it in Dicey Dungeon, and it’s especially good when the dice has symbols instead of dots, you really feel like you’re getting your money’s worth for some reason.

Slice & Dice is really nothing like Dicey Dungeon at all, though, outside of using dice, so actually put that out of your mind immediately. The game is instead a battle gauntlet that is so mechanically complex that it actually doesn’t really bother with any metagame at all. There’s not even a Slay The Spire-a-like map here to navigate–you just fight 20 battles and win or lose. So what makes the game interesting is that mechanical complexity.

You have five characters, representing five dice. Every dice has six symbols on it based on the character class, and as you play through the game after alternating battles you get to choose a character to level up or from a couple of items to equip (which tend to add or remove symbols from the dice of the character you equip it to.) In each battle, you throw the dice, choose which dice you want to keep, and re-roll. You get a lot of leeway to make sure you’re perfectly happy with your hand, but you can never undo a re-roll, so if you set a dice aside before re-rolling, you better be certain that you’re comfortable with what’s on it (if you hit a 1/6 you wanted, sure, if you whiffed on a 1/3? More difficult.) At the end of each turn, everything plays out. You block, attack, perform special actions, and your opponent does the same. If any of your characters die, it’s potentially fine, you just lose them for the rest of the battle and they come back the next battle with less health–you just can’t let this snowball.

In some respects it’s like playing five games of Slay the Spire with decks of six cards at once, where you have to make sure every character you have is working together, and I think for some people this is probably one of the greatest versions of “this kind of thing” that you could ever play.

The thing is though… I could not gel with it.

I wanted to tell myself that I’ve probably played too much of “this kind of thing” recently, but it’s not that. I simply don’t think the UI experience is pleasant, at all!

The main issue is this: the game is entirely symbols. Which means that if you want to understand basically anything, you have to right click on it to see what the symbol means. And all the symbols are tiny. On an average screen you might find yourself having to click 8 different things, and then remember those things, to work out if you’re happy with a roll or not. 

You’d think that this would get easier, and across a single playthrough, you do get more comfortable. But there are hundreds of symbols, and as you’re changing one out of five characters every two battles, you feel like you’re in a constant battle of re-learning, as you hover over a dice, work out what the side does, then check against the die’s potential six sides to work out if you want to keep it.

It is taxing, and unfortunately, it gums things up enough it becomes boring. The die sides do complicated things and lack the clear readability of a card, so it’s hard to get a full picture without storing it all in your head–and it gets ever worse when characters start to have specific mechanics, like performing magic.

(Now, I did play the PC version. The Android version uses portrait mode and looks easier to parse with more space for the tooltips. It’s a shame you can’t play it that way on PC, or put your Steam Deck in tate mode, where it’s borderline unplayable as it is.)

It’s a game for people who like doing math, and doing it in their head, and it puts me in the unusual position of saying that I think the core of this is honestly really great, and that I think it would be amazing if the UI was more suitable, but even then… I don’t really think it’s for me. 

Will I ever play it again? I just don’t want to. I beat it once.

Final Thought: This is a labour of love for a near-solo developer who worked on it for seven years (“tann” who had help on pixel art from a3um and music from Ziggurath, Aleksander Zabłocki, Louigi Verona, Cold Sanctum, Ro'sø and Andrew Goodwin) and you can feel it in how incredibly overstuffed and idiosyncratic it is. I respect it! But yeah, not for me.