Indie creature-collecting roguelike Dicefolk has gotten some positive steam this week following release on February 27. In it you use magical dice to build up your team of mythical creatures—Chimeras—in order to defeat a mysterious evil threat. There’s a demo if you want to try it for yourself.
Just watching the trailer lets you know that Dicefolk has one big thing going for it above many other roguelike deck-or-dice-builders: It’s made up of some quite nice, quite traditional-looking, art and animation.
The game itself is double-layered, with a node map to traverse and explore coupled with battles between your Chimeras and enemies. For all that it’s a dice-based game there is some customization here as you tweak and change the faces on the dice and pick which monsters to recruit in the first place. You choose the order that your creatures take action in combat, too, which lets you have some tactical decisions during the flow of battle.
Dicefolk is a pretty midrange to simple roguelike in this genre, and I think will appeal to those who don’t love the more complex and varied combinations and builds you get in games like Slay the Spire. Which is to say that you can expect to see a lot of the monsters, and most of the artifacts to tweak them with, in any given run.
You can find Dicefolk on Steam for $15, where it also has a demo. Dicefolk is developed by LEAP Game Studios and Tiny Ghoul, while it’s published by Good Shepherd Entertainment.