There are some game premises that are simply irresistible. “Play a sinister game of poker dice against blood-thirsty demon billionaires who’ve trapped you on their mega yacht” is the kind of pitch I cannot turn down.
So it is that I find myself sweatily rolling dice against a leering vampire as I go all-in with several of my own fingers as the pot.
Dead Finger Dice makes a great first impression. Beyond that deliciously bleak concept, its starkly monochrome visuals and retro interface make it brilliantly unsettling from the jump. There’s something particularly creepy about getting most of your exposition via a 1980s-era email inbox in your cabin.
Structurally, it’s a roguelike, with a dash of deck-building—or rather, dice-building. Each round, you confront one of the monstrous billionaires in a game of dice poker, and afterwards you can use rewards like fingers, bones, and cubes of flesh to craft new dice with special effects.
The dice poker itself is disarmingly simple, once you get past the fact that you’re playing for fingers. You roll five dice, looking for hands like pairs, three of a kind, and full house. You get three rolls, and can hold some or all of your dice each time, as you seek a specific hand.
There’s a degree of bluffing and bravado. You don’t know what hand the billionaire is building, but you can see how many dice they’re holding back each time, and you can raise the ante against each other to try and intimidate someone into folding.
And… that’s kind of it. Special dice are hard to come by, and while their powers are good, they’re unreliable—such as a 50% chance of increasing their value by one after rolling. Some bosses have their own powers, such as locking one of your dice to its current side permanently, but the overall game isn’t radically shifted as a result.
The more I play, the more I think there’s just not quite enough roguelike DNA in Dead Finger Dice. Too much of it is just playing dice poker with a few small tweaks—particularly because for the first boss, neither of you has any powers yet, and given the difficulty of the game you’ll be seeing him a lot.
I’m craving that moment where a strategy clicks into place and I’m able to bend the rules to my will, but after two hours I’m still just rolling dice and hoping for the most part. It’s like if Balatro just made you play normal poker for two hours while you dreamt of having a single joker.
Even the game’s sinister tone loses its impact fast with repetition. Every single time you lose, you have to cut all ten of your fingers off one-by-one, for example—at first, gross and shocking, but after the fifth time, you’re just wishing there was a fast-forward button for your mutilation. Never before have I had the thought “I’m sick of chopping off my own fingers”, but there’s a first time for everything.
There is one really interesting twist: your cabin has a hiding place, where you can leave dice, crafting materials, and fingers that persist between runs. Given the absence of any permanent meta-progression systems, I suspect the intent is for you to build your own, giving yourself a head start in future runs by squirreling away key dice.
But building up a stash powerful enough to make a difference currently seems to me like a long and thankless grind. And all it takes is dying once to lose everything you brought into a match with you—given the amount of luck involved in the game, the chances of a cruel anti-climax are always high.
So, just like in real life, I think I’m going to have to let the billionaires win for now, despite that wonderfully alluring premise. Maybe that was the point all along—a biting satire of the fruitless grind of capitalism? If so, I prefer my metaphors a little less punishing.
But if you’re still as intrigued as I was, you can check out a free demo of Dead Finger Dice on Steam now.
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