Any roguelike game that comes prepared with numbers getting bigger, satsifyingly explosive animations, and a killer pixel graphic aesthetic is well poised to instantly grab my attention. In that regard, Rune Dice understood the assignment.
Developed by Smart Raven Studio, Rune Dice is billed as a deckbuilder, but really, it’s more of a dicebuilder than anything else. As the name suggests, Rune Dice‘s main conceit is all about dealing damage by rolling dice. Battles play out in turn-based affairs, where you’ll roll a dice, deal a bunch of damage to enemies, then rinse and repeat.
Like any good roguelike game (though this is more of a roguelite), however, things rarely stay that simple. The hook here is that each time you throw matching dice together, they combine to become a higher level dice. For instance, you’ll often start out by throwing a die with 1s on all its sides. Throw it at another 1-die, and it becomes a 2-die. Rune Dice also boasts a pretty impressive physics engine, where the dice all jump and bounce off each other depending on how you roll them. If the 2-die you just created happens to tip toward another nearby 2-die, it becomes a 3-die. The amount of damage you deal is dependent on the numbers on each die you combine, and as you can imagine, things can get pretty crazy pretty quickly.
Aside from just making the numbers get bigger, Rune Dice features tons of different types of dice with special effects. These are tied together with the different playable classes in the game, including the Rogue, Mage, Warrior, and Bard, just to name a few. The Rogue specializes in dodging, which means that you’ll usually start out with dice with dodge effects. Combine the dice successfully, and your Rogue will be able to dodge the next enemy attack.
The Mage is where things start to get really interesting, as you gain access to more zany dice effects, such as AoE magic and freezing. The Warrior, on the other hand, is more focused on blocking and stunning. There are so many different dice to experiment with, and the dicebuilding aspect of the game kicks in as you get further into a run and you’re forced to start thinking about what types of dice you want to start a battle with.
When you first start out, it might be tempting to grab as many 1-dice as possible. After all, these are the primary building blocks of how much damage you can deal. However, I’d recommend getting rid of these and start off with higher level dice as you get unlock more biomes. At some point, chaining effects becomes much more effective than simply trying to hit bigger numbers, and your strategy will naturally shift to trying to pinball your dice off each other to get multiple dice combinations in a single turn.
Your runs take place on an overworld map with multiple paths to choose from. There are regular battles, tough battles, and other nodes that let you upgrade your dice, get perks from a jester, or purchase and sell items at a shop. There are also relics and runes to collect; the former are kind of like items you can equip that give you various boons for that run, while the latter are one-use items for combat. For instance, there are relics that allow you to recover a set amount of HP after each battle, while runes can be used to weaken your foes, or pull all of the dice together on the field to get some free combinations before your first roll.
I will say that the difficulty ramps up very quickly in Rune Dice. While the game has only three biomes, the jump from the first to second is significant. This desert-themed biome comes with more enemy effects that you need to deal with, such as poison and counters, which will force you to eat extra damage that could kill you before you even get to take your next turn. Being forced to think out of the box and strategize is great, though I do wish the difficulty ramp was just a bit gentler.
I do also wish there were more biomes. At present, you’ll need to defeat three different bosses in each biome in order to unlock the next one. I would’ve vastly preferred playing through different themed biomes instead, especially since there’s not exactly a lot of variety in the game’s soundtrack. After the first handful of hours, the music — while good, don’t get me wrong — starts to feel very repetitive and even a little grating at times, simply due to the lack of variety.
This feels particularly egregious because it’s clear there’s so quite a bit of depth to each of the classes. Within each class, there are multiple unique characters to unlock, each with their own unique starting dice loadouts. They can all be leveled up individually too, allowing you to permanently increase their stats and relic slots. Which means that Rune Dice offers plenty — and I mean plenty — of replay value where the classes and characters are concerned. The problem is, I don’t see myself sticking with this game for all that long after clearing all of the biomes. There’s simply not enough boss or biome variety to keep me invested, and that’s a damn shame.
Rune Dice‘s unique dice-rolling gameplay and physics-based strategy kept me entertained and engaged for the whole of its runtime. However, the success of a roguelike lives and dies by its replayability and enemy variety, not just the depth of its classes and items. I think genre fans will likely be pleased with what Rune Dice has to offer, but considering how crowded the genre itself is right now, it’s hard to give this one a full-throated recommendation as it stands.
A review code for the game was provided by the publisher. You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on PC.
