Shuffle Up Games’ Circadian Dice is a little game of dice-manipulation and dungeon delving. It sneakily promises short play sessions and then draws you in for hours.
Each run, you face off against predetermined waves of enemies using a character and equipment of your choice. There are six different heroes that all play differently, using might, magic, or other abilities to vanquish their foes. Then you roll your six-sided dice. These determine the amount of damage you do, shields you raise, wounds you heal, or magical gems you get. If you manage to survive your run, your final score is used to unlock more stuff.
The game plays like a deck builder, but instead of new cards to collect, Circadian Dice allows you to upgrade the sides of your dice. With the gold you can earn, you’re able to buy new faces for your dice. Runs are so short that an intricate leveling system wouldn’t make much sense and this game isn’t really about persistent character growth.
Instead, making your dice more powerful with little effort lends itself well to the limited scope of each run. Oh, and the joy of replacing a single sword icon with three swords or a sword/shield/key combination will never get old. It immediately raises your chances to get out of your current run alive… if the dice fall in your favor, that is.
The game is easy to grasp but, thanks to the gradually-revealed wealth of unlockables, it doesn’t get boring. New classes, new levels, new relics that you can build your tactics around… All of this allows for more strategic diceplay and builds for the different character classes. The fact that you can play a round or two during your lunch break and still get something out of it is just brilliant design. However, Circadian Dice will probably get its hooks into you for hours.
Circadian Dice is available now on itch.io.
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