I’ve finished the game with all the available characters, haven’t unlocked everything but really not in the mood too. Haven’t played hard mode either but I’ll get into that as well.

Overall, I think there’s a fun core idea here. I wanted to give it a full chance and I did, and I’m willing to come back to it later after updates to see if they’ve improved it. As it is, though, I don’t think I can recommend this game. I have a few points and I’ll list them in order of increasing importance.

1) The game is buggy. Maybe once every two games I’d experience a bug that required starting the game over. These could be relatively minor and they never killed any of my games, and they usually took the form of some enemy sticking on the screen after being defeated, or an enemy being defeated for no reason, or the game soft locking until restarted. It happened often enough it’s hard to overlook, and shows a lack of polish.

2) The user interface can be frustrating. For the most part its functional, but occasionally it is really bad. Sometimes buttons don’t click right, like the ‘reroll’ button in shops. Sometimes dice LOOK like they’re in a slot, but they aren’t, and when you click ‘end turn’ the dice just gets wasted. Scrolling through items and characters is really clunky and they aren’t presented in a friendly way. Sometimes trinkets I picked out didn’t actually work and I had to restart and try again. Pretty much every game I played eventually had some kind of UI related issue. 95% of it works fine but every time it didn’t, it just made the game feel amateurish.

3) Dishonest advertising. I do believe this game can, with effort, be made into something unique and fun. However the Steam page is deliberately deceptive and that leaves a sour taste in my mouth that makes this feel more like a cash grab. In the very first paragraph the game describes what sounds like an RPG experience, with ‘attacks’ and ‘damage’, but neither of those things are in the game! Each round is more like a puzzle, enemies do not have health and you do not have attacks. The store page continues by saying the game has ‘deckbuilding’- no, it doesn’t. There’s no cards you draw or play or organize. There’s a ‘deck’ of enemies, but that’s just aesthetic, and you have no control over it! There’s a ‘deck’ of items but those are just items! You can’t slap them on a card and call it a deck builder when there’s no actual deck interaction. There’s one ‘path’ and you don’t get ANY input in gameplay challenges past the very beginning where you pick a character. The store page compares it to Slay the Spire which is just embarrassing. This game is not like Slay the Spire at all, and that comes off like a way to try and goose sales by drawing a comparison to a popular and very well made game and genre. The thing is, the game’s core mechanics are good enough to stand on their own, but I guess that’s just not as sellable as slapping trendy indie game buzzwords on your store page to squeeze out what cash you can from fans of the genre.

4) The game incentivises really boring play. The loading tooltips even suggests this, so this isn’t just me being bad at the game or a personal opinion. There’s a well intentioned feature letting you ‘spend’ useless dice you roll to get gold, which is an important resource since the majority of the customization you do during gameplay comes from acquiring items which you need gold to do. I get this- it sucks having to waste turns in a game due to bad RNG. This means, though, you generally want to eliminate high priority threats early, then stall out each round for as long as possible to amass as much gold as possible. This is INCREDIBLY easy and safe to do, and the gameplay itself rewards this as the more dice you roll, the more likely you are to get bonuses like health and more dice in future rounds. This is hands down an incredibly tedious and unfun (but reliable and literally rewarding) way to play the game. I do not want to play ‘match the shape to the hole’ but with dice numbers over the course of several minutes while a 1 attack enemy plinks away at my 140 health character. I will not engage with hard mode for that reason- I don’t want to be required to use tactics that are incredibly dull and make me want to close the game and play something fun.

The thing is, the game is FANTASTIC if you happen to get together the ability to end combat in a single round. Each round is the most fun on the first turn, and there’s a very (intrinsically) rewarding feeling when you can clear a stage in a single round. However this is almost always a bad idea in-game! You lose out on so much by finishing battles quickly that you’ll probably lose the game later on because you haven’t been snowballing resources.

5) Building off the previous point, the enemies themselves almost require massive stockpiling of resources because in the late game, there’s just a complete lack of variety. Enemies are defeated by matching dice you roll to their ‘slots’, which have conditions. Early game the conditions are like ‘roll a 2’ or ‘roll something greater than 3’, but in the later game enemies start just amassing large ‘countdown’ type slots you have to fill, so more like ‘roll enough dice to equal 30’. This requires having tons of high value dice to meet the criteria, which functionally almost always means if you’ve been blitzing through the game and don’t have a lot of good high value dice saved up, you’re screwed. It seems obvious to me that enemies should have MORE slots, rather than higher value slots, but with no way to actually change the dice you roll I understand why this isn’t the case. It wasn’t that uncommon for me to not roll a number I needed even with 7+ dice and that’s a REALLY bad feeling so I get why they didn’t want to set up more situations where that would occur.

But most of the enemies and bosses are just dumb ‘roll high value dice as many times as possible’ challenges which is not interesting or engaging at all. There are some good enemies in here though! The devil, which requires three 1s, was great because it forced me to always consider keeping a 1 dice around instead of just stockpiling 6s. The reaper enemy was similar. There’s an enemy that doubles its attack each round that I wish had a more difficult clear requirement, because it was pretty spooky whenever it showed up but it was almost always trivial to get rid of. Sometimes I’d get an (expensive and rare) item that gave back a dice if I cleared certain enemies in a certain way, and that was refreshing enough to change up my priorities of how I approached battles. I wish there was more of that!

Overall I really want to like this game and will change my review if/when these issues are addressed. As is, it just feels too ‘early access’ to me with the bugs and UI issues, and with how unfun it gets when playing. For a game about ‘risk and reward’ as the misleading store page explains, there just isn’t a lot worth the risk. Maybe that’s why there’s no demo!

while i thought the game was fun for a bit, i wouldn't recommend it to other people. it is just too poorly balanced and does not provide enough strategic depth to compensate for its randomness. some characters feel too stomp-heavy, but the majority of them feel underpowered.

i reached my tipping point with the craftsman. it is nearly impossible to get to the later stages of the game on normal and up without good luck, and the game allows you no item slots for him. it is weird that the game decides for you how many item slots each character is allowed to have. it should be up to me how i want to support a character's playstyle. i get that it's to help with balance, but to me it's just showcasing the flaws in your gameplay by artificially handicapping heroes.
it also seems weird that the game expects you to tank so many hits in the first few rounds (the boar is almost always in the first rounds, which deals unavoidable damage unless your character has a shield), even if you are not playing a character expected to heal, and if you take too many hits in the first rounds, you might as well start over.
additionally, there are so few times where i actually completed the gold dice slots. there is little to no incentive to do so because, often, you have to choose whether that blue dice will go to folding a card, or tanking its damage just to fill one of many slots. and gold means nothing if you cannot live to use it. plus, so many of the items are basically useless unless you purchase them with other items or use them with a specific companion, which are all random. making gold hard to collect but easy to waste makes strategic gameplay difficult to pay off.
these are just a few of many strange occurrences in this game that make it difficult to play, and its problem is that it puts so little of the game within your control, and so much of it up to random chance. and, this is a small thing, but dungeon crawler-type games usually boast a team of adventurers, so it feels weird to only allow two characters at a time?

unfortunately, it is a game that depends so heavily on rng. but rng is not a substitute for gameplay.

The game seems fine, but I hate that the optimal way to play it is to drag every single fight on and on and on until you get the right rolls to set up your economy or get your skills ready before the next fight.

You know when you have a really boring run of Slay The Spire where you have to keep stalling in order to use Feed to increase max health? In this game, every fight is that fight, and you will get decimated unless you play like that in anything above normal.

Played a lot of the demo, and the full game is more of the same. Good, fun little game, run length is perfect (you're not stuck for too long clearing one run), the variation added in the 1.0 release seems interesting at a quick revisit, but I'm not sure how much replayability there is. Game mechanics are quite similar to Dicey Dungeons, which leads me to a small criticism which I mentioned in the demo feedback, game progress isn't like Slay The Spire and item choice is not like Vampire Survivors, so the comparisons to those two games in the description is odd. Doesn't detract from it being a good game though.

So... there's the core of a good game here, make no mistake. The concept works, rolling dice and manipulating the numbers in clever ways to use your actions as efficiently as possible is fun, and that's been proven - the comparisons to games like Dicey Dungeons, Circadian Dice and One Deck Dungeon are obvious. But in practice, the mechanics for this one don't come together in a way that makes this game actually fun to play.

You're given a lot of choice on how to use your dice in a turn - using them on enemies to Fold (defeat) them or spending them on your character's unique ability (and there are a whole lot of character to choose from!), same for your companion's ability. There's a row of six numbered slots on the right-- fill the whole row with dice and you gain extra currency to spend on valuable items between rounds. You can even save your dice for another turn in a three-slot tray so you don't waste rolls.

However, you only get TWO dice per turn and that number barely increases over the course of a run. Standard enemies take one or two dice to kill, stronger enemies easily up to six-- any enemies you don't kill attack you for precious health. You can't recover easily, so you can't afford to leave enemies alive; you have to kill them as soon as possible. And that's where the problems start.

Want to play an economic run and use the investment slots to earn coins? Well, you need at least three full turns of rolling dice for a single gold coin. That means three turns of getting hit and losing health, something you can't afford-- even rare healing options often cost multiple coins to buy. You can heal for free; dice (very) rarely turn red after rolling and you can spend them to recover health. But those dice aren't used to kill enemies, so choosing to heal yourself instead of attacking often isn't worth the trade-off.

Do your hero or acompanion abilities help? Not always - while some are useful, most of the time they're only good in niche cases or again, not worth the trade-off. For example, spending 8 pips worth of dice to fill in a single enemy slot is nice, but often inefficient. Most stronger enemies have three slots, so filling in one doesn't do much unless it would've cost you vastly more otherwise. If you need to hit specific numbers, well, you can just save dice from previous turns anyway-- and again, those are dice not used on getting income, or recovering health... Companion abilities suffer the same problem; a lot of them are ludicrously expensive and using them effectively costs you health you can't spare. Not to mention your companion has health too and can die... and there's no sense not letting them do so since getting a second companion replaces the first, effectively turning them into extra health bars.

Okay, but how about abusing the systems more? Leave a single, weak enemy alive and you can spend as many rolls as you want building up a strong tray and earning coins, right...? Well, no-- you only get eight rolls per fight. Any longer and an invincible enemy spawns to drain your health until you win. This includes rerolls, by the way; meaning any abilities that reroll dice or even roll extra ones count against your timer. Why use an ability that gives you one extra die if you can just take another turn instead? You're given no freedom to try and break the game like in many other roguelikes - there's systems in place to beat you down when you try.

And then there's the things you actually spend your income on; all items, apart from being hard to afford, are passive. Your dice have a 5% higher chance of being red. If you roll doubles, you gain two silver coins (you need about twenty to buy anything decent). They're all so incredibly... boring. Almost no synergies to build towards, and the ones that are there are expensive to afford - because obviously, re-rolling the shop costs a gold coin, too.

The more I played this game the more obvious it become that I'm not really making many choices at all; the optimal decisions are often obvious and straightforward, and annoyingly uninteresting. The game plays itself, basically. And it's a shame because the idea is sound, all the individual pieces for a great roguelike are there - they just don't fit together in a fun way.

If you made it all the way through this review and you want other games that play with similar concepts (but do it far better in my opinion), here's some recommendations:

• Dicey Dungeons plays very similar to this game. Roll dice and spend them on abilities to attack enemies or defend, a la Slay the Spire. In this title your abilities change and evolve over the course of a run so you likewise get to evolve and change your strategy as you go. Looks mighty charming too, and has a great soundtrack.
  
• One Deck Dungeon is an adaptation of a boardgame that uses the same approach of playing dice directly on enemies or traps to defeat them. Enemy slots usually have requirements, and your abilities come into play by altering the dice to fit slots. The difference is that you roll a crapton more dice per round and get way more tools to alter your dice - every fight turns into a puzzle, which you get to play into by improving the tools you have in a run. Health and recovery becomes an actual resource you have to weigh, here.
  
• Poker Quest deserves an honorable mention for doing a similar concept but with playing cards instead; your equipment is fueled by certain combinations of cards, and you mess with your hands to get the biggest hits possible while still fitting into your equipment properly. A fun gimmick is that enemies use the same system you do, so you can mess with their attacks/cards to deny them the ability to attack you, too.
  
• Circadian Dice and Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles are probably the farthest removed but still play with dice; in these game the abilities you use are printed directly onto your dice, and you buy/draft new dice/abilities to change the different sides of your dice/add new dice to your pool entirely. Both entirely worth playing!

Do I recommend this game? ABSOFRIGGENLUTELY!!!

Ahhhh the game that introduced me to my very 1st card battler roguelike deckbuilder!
I think the fact that ->>> Your achievement progress: 118 / 177 (67%) AND with a playtime of over 231 hours.... tells you I still have lots more to go on both stats! As well as the fact that there is still 2 more MAJOR updates which means even more achieves & playtime to be added to the game!!!
Both attest strongly to my enjoyment of this game as well as my ever growing folder of games in the afore mentioned categories Nuff said really!

Many ui bugs that either take months to get fixed or do not get fixed.
Poor item balance that defeats the roguelike idea, I find myself choosing the same items every run because other items are just so weak.
Publisher's weird tendency with advertising their other games with IN-GAME ADS that you cant remove.
This game had potential to become a geart roguelike, but I cannot recommend it in the current state.

The problem with D&F is that it doesn't understand what makes a good roguelite. Don't expect to be encouraged to try over and over again in search for new items, discover new synergies and finally break the game. D&F has none of that.

* You pick a character that has one skill... and that's it. No more characters development from here.
* You can hire a companion, but just like the main character, no further development. Their main purpose is to take damage otherwise directed to the main character. Their skills rarely make a difference.
* You collect items during a run that can make a difference, but don't expect deep strategies or game-breaking synergies here. It's telling that the items are obscured behind an uninspired menu, like the developers don't even want you to keep track of them.
* Talking about uninspired design, the UI gives little feedback on the player's actions, like dragging a dice over a slot. Can I even place the dice here? You have to find out by trial and error, don't expect the UI to communicate it. Just some highlighting and hover effects would have been sufficient.
* There's no randomness to the campaign. It's the same set of enemies in the same fixed order over and over and over again.

Overall the game lacks meaningful choices that matter, simply because there are not enough choices to be made in the first place. If you haven't played Dicey Dungeon yet, give that one a go and skip this game.

DEAR DEVS, this is an open letter on how to improve your game. I really like the core loop of your game it's a blend of Poker Quest and Dicey Dungeons. It is highly addictive if a little frustrating. In this review, I will outline a few key adjustments to make it more fun.
1. Being a dice game the bulk of gameplay focuses on the manipulation of dice and pattern recognition. While that is here, the way inventory items and characters/familiars are structured you limit the player ability to manipulate the dice. Things are too random, but once the player figures even slight ways around that (via dice generation) you introduce the Dungeon Master. And if you figure out ways to consistently land your ability you cap it with a once a turn/stage lock on the ability. I.E. punishing the player for finding winning combos. I would argue your safety guards on keeping the game play loop fresh have backfired and instead made the game less fun.
For Example:
Why can't the executioner destroy every character in one foul mana induced swoop, that leaves him defenseless for the next fight? Why is my paladin only allowed to have one spell a fight rather than creating a doubles generator and satisfyingly tanking through every enemy. I would ask you take the brakes off the train and let the player run hog wild.
2. The Dungeon Master. Look, I understand there needs to be a reason not to let the player stand around forever to loot; However I would argue he comes out a little too quickly. Sometimes I'm just having a really hard time hitting a specific dice value on certain characters. Now this could be considered a failure of the build. If the build crafting wasn't so limited by the Structure of gear. Wherein, all things are a subtle often disconnected benefit rather than an interlocking series of pieces. The best way to fix this is to breakdown the use cases of your core mechanics. Once again, you are a turn based dice combat game. The actions are as follow, Resource allocation, risk assessment, Build Crafting, Order of use, and luck. The center right now is Resource Allocation and luck as most of the action centers around where you're putting your money and where the dice go when they go there. Additionally, it rarely matters the order in which you take foes out unless you are running damage reduction. There are hardly any ways to guarantee Special dice, values of dice, Enemy targets or really any form of interaction aside from when you kill an enemy. Which is fine, if you want to be mediocre, but I can sense a team that wants and can do more than that. So what I would do is allow the character to carry more abilities with wider use cases. Why not have relics that do something when the dice is destroyed? Why not have more items that guarantee certain dice under specific player planned scenarios. Why not give characters passive abilities that spec and can be specced into to support their active abilities. Give familiars less shallow upgrades. Go Deeper not wider.

If you have read this far as a developer or as a fellow fan I would hope that this serves less as nagging rant and more of a constructive way to support a game I like. I encourage anyone to take anything or everything I have said and use it to make their game better.

UPDATE v1.2:
Do you folks even check your own game?
After swalling some cool aid and playing past the bugs, I had finished Extreme with 100% of chars, with around 70-80% success rate.
Now wanted to give Warlock a shot... lost 5 outta 5. Improve balance, much?!

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A great start of a game...

But sadly sooo many small bugs and inconsistencies, that playing can grind to a halt.
If it was an early access game, I'd be much less critical, but this is NOT done.

- Rounds that start, but you can't press any button or such.
- Monster that stay beyond round ends.
- ... sometimes keeping attacking.
- Items that randomly work... or not.
- Important parts of descriptions missing.
- Just ... incosistent mechanics (aka: when and what can affect a boss)
- Orange dice doing... just nothing!!
- Lame, dragged out chance bosses (looking at you, Lich spawning sis)
- and more

So many runs broken because that game just got stuck in one way or another, that it can be very, very frustrating.

All in all, it tells me that the devs did NOT actually play their game for more than like 3 runs in the current state, because those things are super obvious.

I'm happy to change the verdict, when and if those things get fixed, because the idea is great and the execution still has a lot upward potential.