Here are two statements I firmly believe in:Paper Mario’svisual style has so much unused potential (especially in the indie game space), and thedungeon crawler is a hella underrated genre.
That’s why earlier this year, Dice ‘n Goblins caught my attention. It’s got the classic dungeon-crawling gameplay, and it’s in that lovely hand-drawn paper style.
The nice little demo I played had the traditional dungeon-crawling aspects mixed with modern RPG combat, making for a unique experience that was somewhat reminiscent ofEtrian Odyssey’sgameplay.
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That said, while the unique meshing of genres and creative dice mechanics charmed me in the demo, RPGs are often slow burns that need to work hard to keep players engaged, so the full game doesn’t always hold up the same.
Especially with an explicitly RNG-focused battle system, Dice ‘n Goblins has a ton on its plate to try and keep me awake, and not just make fights a matter of getting lucky or playing lame.
In this review of Dice ‘n Goblins, I’ll dive deep into the combat and exploration of this cutesy game and show how it handles progression—whether it ends up a slog or a fun romp through some dungeons.
The main gameplay is divided into two halves: the battles and the dungeon crawling. You might expect the dungeons to be flat, maze-like structures, but they’re usuallybuilt more like Zelda dungeons, which I think is fantastic.
There’s a huge reason to explore every part of the map, since you may locate chests that might give you new items to use in battles, or more money to buy items that are usually very solid options overall.
Once you run into a big purple orb of an enemy, though, you transition right into a battle where you need to roll the die to attack, defend, or heal. This does make the game incredibly random at times, but I enjoy the chaos.
For one, you can customize the dice you’re rolling with whatever things you find in the dungeon, and you have stamina that can be used up with special moves or rerolls—which is my main gripe with the combat.
You’d expect rerolls to simply randomize your number within its range, but it hardly works like that. The dice are all physics objects in the battle, and can hit walls or ceilings, often making rerolls not random at all.
This frequently led to frustrating sequences where I would burn my stamina on a reroll only for the die to go nowhere and land on the same number. The special attacks can somewhat mitigate this, but not enough to make it a non-issue.
When it’s all said and done, this combat system feelssimilar to a game like Slay the Spire, and especially likeDicey Dungeons, but with number combos that can grant special effects that rarely come about due to how janky rerolling is.
I would also enjoy it if the combat influenced the exploration at all, as dungeon crawling feels the same throughout the entire game while combat is constantly changing, but at the very least, it is very satisfying to win hard battles.
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Roll For Charisma
Progression goes just about how you’d expect. You run into tankier enemies with higher damage attacks, and bosses require a bit more strategy due to a new status effect or gimmick they employ.
The only issue I find with this is merely the idea of healing dice in itself. You can win almost every fight in this game by having two attack dice, a shield dice, and filling the other slots with healing dice.
This strategy is slow, boring, and works on every fight in the game with zero drawbacks. The game never gets so challenging that you need to think of a build that centers around one specific strategy; you can just heal everything off.
I would have much preferred the addition of consumable healing dice, but by the second dungeon, you may already have two healing dice that stick around permanently and make tanking hits supremely viable.
Combine that with the ability to transmute defense dice into more healing, especially since doing this makes that roll even more effective, and you can imagine how the typical difficult fight ends up going.
You can just say, “Well, if that’s so boring, then just don’t do it”, but the reality is, players are always going to take the path of least resistance, and when that path is this readily apparent, it makes the whole game feel uninteresting.
Scrawling Scrolls
The story in Dice ‘n Goblins is actually what kept me the most engaged, with rather silly and amusing dialogue, and cutscenes conveying a story that implies a grander world than you’re able to see with some sinister elements.
Every character you get to talk to is enjoyable in their own ways, from a thief who makes a deal with you despite you never asking, to a funny mouse that tries to move diagonally and is punished for even considering that.
It’s not all goofy shenanigans, though. The lore behind the setting you find yourself in and why your clan moved to a rather desolate complex of dungeons outside an abandoned artillery area is quite interesting.
I enjoyed it a lot, and seeing cutscenes pop up just frequently enough for me to feel rewarded for getting to the major story points made the pacing quite great. The whole journey felt fun because of it.
Paper Thin
On the surface, the visual style is quite nice, with the hand-drawn textures for areas working well with the cel-shading, and absolutely lovely drawings for each character that bring them all to life.
My main issue is with the animations and lack of variety. It’s quite off-putting to see enemies attacking by rotation 45 degrees on me, and it doesn’t have anywhere near the oomph that something like Paper Mario achieves.
I wish there were at least a handful of drawings for each enemy, as their designs are so interesting and well done, but then they move across the screen with linear interpolation, which looks entirely unnatural.
The animation could use a ton of work in general. Everything feels rigid and slides around mechanically with no new sprites instead of moving naturally, and the paper characters are so stiff and lifeless that it takes me out of the game entirely sometimes.
Pass The Aux
The music in Dice ‘n Goblins is great when it isn’t annoying the hell out of me. This is a pet peeve that is probably only this annoying to me specifically, but I hate how the music never loops properly.
The song playing during dungeon crawling goes on for a bit, then stops for a few seconds, and starts back up again all of a sudden, made even worse by the lack of transitions or fade-outs between different tracks.
The sound design is pretty generic, too. It’s an audioscape that is generally unpleasant to my ears, not because of the sounds themselves, but usually due to the poor implementation ruining the merits of the tracks.
That said, in isolation, the music is rather calming and enjoyable while dungeon crawling, and exciting when it’s time to battle. But even then, the selection is rather limited and can get repetitive by the end.
Polishing Floors
Throughout my time playing the game, I couldn’t help but noticean incredible lack of polish. I had excused this when I played the demo, as I’d assumed the game would significantly improve by the full release, but it didn’t.
All the animations look as basic and janky as possible, I got soft-locked after the first boss for checking my skills, and I can spot that default Godot particle effect on the victory screen from a mile away.
It feels like the base for the game was created, the base visuals were made, and the sounds got a tad rushed. Then they decided that packaging all that together with shoestrings and duct tape was good enough.
The game is about as basic as it can get, given the premise. There’s no stylish flair, and the effort to interpolate things in a slightly more interesting way wasn’t put in either. It just all feels a bit sloppy, unfortunately.
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Overall, in the time I had with Dice ‘n Goblins, the game only really left a solid impression on me at the start, and the rest of it felt like more of the same without evolving its core concepts nearly enough.
The combat feels grindy because I was never challenged in a way that made me change my strategy, the dungeons all felt almost the same with a new coat of paint, and the bosses are just alright.
With a few months of extra development, I could see this becoming a real banger, but in the state it’s in, while I’m playing it, I don’t think it’s all that. It’s fun, it’s cute, but I won’t be longing to come back to it anytime soon.
It’s a great concept, the battle system can be fun with slightly different execution, and all the concepts and ideas it has are great. It’s just the sloppy execution of the majority of the game’s strengths that soils it for me.
Closing Thoughts:
Dice ‘n Goblins is a fun, cute RPG dungeon crawler that suffers from an extreme lack of polish, gameplay that doesn’t shake things up enough, and some questionable mechanics. The style is adorable and looks quite good, but it lacks animation and has a low number of drawings for characters. With a good story and great illustrations, it still felt like a worthwhile romp, but it ends up being mind-numbing or frustrating in most other aspects. It’s a victim of incredible ideas with half-hearted or poor execution, and had me wishing it was so much more.
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Dice ‘n Goblins
Reviewed on PC
WHERE TO PLAY
Explore a mysterious dungeon in this dungeon-crawler RPG.
You are Gobby, a small goblin wanting to find an exit from this seemingly infinite dungeon. But beware! Deadly traps, mad monsters, and even humans infest the labyrinth. Worse, it seems the place is only growing!EXPLORATION - Discover 10 interconnected levels with classic grid-like controls. Walk, run, jump, swim, take stairs, and fall across different floors! Meet a varied cast of inhabitants and maybe make some friends.COMBAT - Fight with your dice in turn-based combat. Luck is not something you can rely on. Only your wits will lead you to victory. Unleash unstoppable combos using your dice and skills.LOOT - Crack open chests and discover powerful new dice to add to your arsenal. Trade items and abilities with the dungeon merchant. Build yourself a unique dice pool and unlock devastating skills!
