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Sometimes, I don’t want world-spanning quests and epic theatrics out of my RPGs—some days I just want to be a little guy hitting monsters and seeing my numbers go up. Dice ‘n’ Goblins, which releases on Steam today, is a perfect fix for that kind of hankerin’.
The premise of Dice ‘n’ Goblins is that you’re a little creature working your way through a big ol’ dungeon, trying to help your people escape a giant, spider-like machine. The art style is cute and simple, and everything has this Paper Mario-esque charm to it—it doesn’t always hold together, and some menus (such as the shop) can be confusing to navigate. But it’s perfectly serviceable, and even pretty at times.
The real meat to the potatoes is its combat system, which is a lot more interesting than it looks at first glance. In Dice ‘n’ Goblins, you roll dice (surprise!) each turn—these are informed by your equipment: Equip a dagger, and you get a four-sided damage die, and so on. They’re split up into three types—damage, defense, and healing.
Both you and your enemies can also proc combos. Basically, if you roll a certain set of dice, you can activate specific effects depending on what items you’ve got equipped—as can your enemies. For example, I had a bandage that gave me a big boost of healing if I rolled a one, two, and a three. This interacts with your skills in a way that’s downright neat.
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Your gobbo has points—the little stars, seen above—it can use to reroll dice, but it can also use them to slot your dice into skills. I grabbed two versions of the Smite spell, which turned one of my healing dice into a damage die. Smite 1 also lowered it by one point, whereas Smite 2 increased it by two points.
But because of my combos—all oriented around the number two—I actually got more use out of Smite 1 than its more powerful counterpart. This is a cool way to keep earlier skills relevant that I haven’t really seen explored before: The more abilities you have, the more ways you can hedge your luck into specific combos. It’s a bright little idea that works swimmingly.
While I’ve only had a bash at its demo, I’m a little freak for TTRPG-style rules systems like this, and I could already see a bunch of different builds stretching out before me. The fact that enemies get combos is really cunning, too—it means you shouldn’t put all of your eggs in one numerical basket. If a boss flattens your poor goblin butt when you roll 2’s, you shouldn’t have equipment that gives you a boost when you roll 2s, for example. This forces you, in theory, to diversify when you’ve got the equipment slots for it at higher levels.
The only real frustrations I had were its map. Outside of battles, Dice ‘n’ Goblins is a classical dungeon crawler ala Legend of Grimrock—which means lots of square tiles, levers to flip, and falling down holes. Because the artstyle is very simplistic, this often meant I’d get lost in its samey-looking dungeon halls; and while you can leave notes on the map, I got turned around more than once. However, my working memory is shot, so your mileage may vary.
Overall, Dice ‘n’ Goblins is an adorable little time with some genuinely interesting RPG mechanics thrumming under the hood—if you’re hankering for some lo-fi dungeon crawling goodness, you can do far worse than this little RPG.
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Kurt Indovina
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