Never would I have thought that I’d be reviewing a dice-based poker roulette game, but the 1-bit visual treat that is Dead Finger Dice never needed to do anything more to capture my attention than flash a bit of pixel. Boy, do I love these visuals. As you might be aware, I have a penchant for this sort of aesthetic, what with Critters For Sale being one of my favourite games.
But… as indicated, it’s a dice-based game and not some existential visual novel. Double but: the premise is exceedingly good. The pitch. You’re stranded aboard a billionaire’s super yacht and are forced to play these dice games in exchange for your life. The clientele who occupy the vessel aren’t nobodies either. Nosferatu, Medusa, that blood from That 70s Show… they’re all here, and not they’re the type of fat cats that like to gamble with people’s body parts rather than get up to no good on secluded islands or oil-heavy gatherings.
While I’m sure most gamers like to tweak with their settings so they can upskirt NPCs via puddles, I’m looking for originality, unusual characters and the absurd. The presentation in Dead Finger Dice, a game by Rocket Adrift Games and published by Black Lantern Collective, looks and sounds the part, with some excellent animations, an enjoyable soundtrack and imagery that will burn into your retinas. Any game that has my wife wince and say something is sick without forcing me to pack my bags is a win for me.
Despite being a luxurious yacht, your dwellings are somewhat mediocre. A prison cell, if you will. A bed will allow for a saved game, there’s a place to craft dice, plus somewhere to stash items to strategically apply in a round. Did I mention that this is a rogue-like that features permadeath? No? Well, it is, and as frustrating as that is when you start to make progress, it genuinely adds to the charm and also the gameplay loop. Granted, you could save and replay rounds until you get it right, but it’s still a great mechanic.
As for Dead Finger Dice’s gameplay, that’s where I become the class clown and distract you with a prank or amusing anecdote to distract from my poor intellect: it took me a while to get it. I don’t like conventional card games besides Snap and Solitaire, plus I hate UNO. I have my reasons. Additionally, dice games bore me – perhaps childhood experience of everything being too much on chance rather than skill and getting complacent. Who knows? Maybe I’ll hire a therapist. Anyways, the rules and ‘additional bits’ to the actual dice throwing were perplexing.
Essentially, you’re going to go up against an opponent and place, raise and call your bets to earn all the winnings. The winnings, or bets, are fingers – not chocolate fingers but actual human fingers. When you’re out of bets, you then place bets for things you do not theoretically have to wager. Think of the gambling addict who bets his car or home, placing the keys on the table. He doesn’t need to arrange for the bricks and mortar to be delivered to the table.
Here, however, you continue to bet fingers: your own. Should you lose, you have to make good on your bet and slice the required fingers off your mitts (which don’t grow back). This is grotesquely represented by a mini guillotine located on the table. Provided you haven’t hit rock bottom and lost all your digits, you can select which ones to remove and manually press a button to permanently remove them from your body! This was what my wife witnessed and yelled that it was sick. I thought it was bloody brilliant.
Interestingly, Dead Finger Dice can reward quite early on, what with it being a game of chance, and on my first attempt, I beat the starting opponent. Off went their fingers, and then they disintegrated. They were a vampire, don’t you know. The winning streaks seemed to follow; however, the opponents have their own little tricks to even the odds, making it borderline impossible to win unless through a fluke. This is where stashing objects and crafting come into play.
Stashed body parts can be crafted into dice that can potentially steal our opponent’s dice or even increase the value. The caveat is that there’s only a chance that this could happen, and the general theme of the game. What makes this particularly challenging is the permadeath element, as once you die, everything is lost. What effectively happens is you’ll save between every single round – potentially a variation of save games – and cross your fingers (heh!) that you might just win.
This could prove to be a turn off for many as you aren’t making those marginal gains, but I have to say, for all the seemingly complex rules and high risk, low rewards involved, I was quite enamoured with Dead Finger Dice, especially as it doesn’t just end with a simple roll of the dice, but an abundance of hints throughout that direct to the multiple endings. If you want to try something fiendishly different that doesn’t follow the path of a conventional rogue-like, then I will have to point you (if a finger is available) towards the Steam page.
