Recent reviews by Lesser John

Okay, first lemme just say, there are zero dice in this game, as well as zero things that function like dice. The title is misleading. Not deceptive, but it gives the wrong impression. More on that later...

Went into this with a shrug and a "well, I can refund it if it blows". By the time I took a look at how long I'd played it...I was well beyond the two hour mark. Embarrassingly so actually lol! This is an absolute banger of a game, and I recommend it as hard as I can! This game has a ton of personality, an amazing amount of depth, and overall shows a ton of heart ♥

The actual mechanic is, I feel, WAY more interesting than what I was expecting! There's no simple term for it that I know of... Combat billiards with cube shaped balls is one way to put it. Or maybe somewhat like if you played marbles, but using dice? Bocce maybe? Point is, you fling stuff into other stuff, to make stuff do stuff 🤭

When done with the right amount of skill and a bit of luck...because these aren't pool balls, they are cubes, they sometimes bounce in absurd ways, which actually feels more acceptable than when a game decides to make balls bounce at angles that are scientifically speaking, utterly ridiculous...you get the wonderful experience of the whole board full of cubes erupting into numerical popcorn! Cube go brr, brain go brr, everyone goes brr! Especially you!

The mechanic also helps relieve much of the post-run crash that these types of games sometimes cause. I'll compare it to Peglin to illustrate this term, since there's a lot of visual and mechanical overlap here. You finish a run of Peglin with absolutely absurd combos of balls and pegs and whatever other nonsense going on. And it feels good! Then you start a new run. Your first shot...hits one peg and bounces at some absurd angle...right into the abyss. That's very...underwhelming... We see that same effect in a lot of games...not just that you're not as powerful as you were a moment ago, you've also suddenly become very boring. This game addresses that quite well! I don't feel "ugh..." when starting a new run. There's no boring part to slog thru before your character's options begin being fun again. Really love that part ♥ Here, what happens is that even on room one, turn one, you still have a little geometry puzzle to solve, figuring out the best way to fling your one sided dice to make other dice donk into each other so they cause multiple paralell chain reactions, and usually pull off something that felt fun to do. Much greater room for player decisions to matter, and for them to feel good while doing so! It makes "one more run" a much more rewarding proposition than I see in many of these types! Rune DIce proves, you can remove power without removing fun!

There's like...two whole D&D parties worth of characters here to play, each one comes in 3 flavors of starting loadout. Rogue, Warrior, Mage, Archer, Druid, Bard, Paladin, Necromancer. Each has it's own unique cubes and relics, with each one ending up feeling and playing differently than the others.

I, at least, get a fair bit of run bleed from this game. You know the effect, you finish a run, then find yourself making tactical decisions based on effects that no longer apply from items you no longer own. Usually realized .1 second After you've already played your turn... I attribute this to the rather streamlined gameflow that seems to be the trend in these games. Finish run. Recap screen. Maybe some unlocks. Back to character select. The meta progression is passive, xp based basically, rather than collecting resources to upgrade stuff. I feel like adding the chance to go do Something else, even just for a minute or two, between runs would maybe help runs not bleed together quite so much. It doesn't even have to contribute any meta progress, gimme a town to decorate or something to do for a few minutes between runs.

Okay, now I'm gonna ramble a bit about the title. No real "review" beyond this point.

Rune Dice. Makes me think of someone trying to hop on the bandwagon with Dicey Dungeons, Die In The Dungeon, Astrea: Six Sided Oracles...to name only three contenders in that crowded category. And as mentioned, there are exactly zero dice in this game. That matters immensely, because whether you came looking for yet another take on "StS, but with dice", or find that idea offputting...this is not that game. I'm not just being Technically Correct Man from Well, Ackshually. I'm not just hairsplitting about the "dice" being cubes with the same number on each side. It sets an incorrect expectation.

Even the "Rune" half of the title feels kinda...stapled on... The game does contain things called runes. This is true. They are consumable items. Potions, basically. They look like a d4, and have no properties that I would associate with runes. Mechanically, they are potions. There is no reason they need to be "runes", besides maybe as an excuse to use rune in the title.

Put the two together...Rune DIce... The runes aren't really rune-like, and there are absolutely not any dice. Misleading title. Not necessarily deceptive, but misleading. Misleading in the worst way too, it makes the game sound lame! Honestly, very bland and SEO feeling title too. Like..."what are the most commonly searched words in gaming that we can plausibly use for a title?" It tells nothing about the game, worse, it gives an impression of a game that it isn't, a lesser game at that. Rune DIce makes me think I'll be rolling dice that have something that looks like runes on each side. You do not, the actual game is incredibly more interesting. In a world that is increasingly burying itself under unimaginative derivative soulless heartless bandwagoning nonsense...for a game that clearly shows more heart than a...uhhh...I dunno...something with a lotta hearts? Heart store? Spire? Anyway... For such a unique and interesting game, that someone(s) clearly cares a ton about, one that should easily stand head and shoulders above the crowd...to bury that under such a bland boring beige title like "Rune Dice" is like...some kinda crime against culture or something!

I'd love to know how this title was chosen, and by whom, and why...it just feels so spectacularly bad, that the explanation is probably...completely mundane and possibly boring actually...

And now...not because anyone asked me to, nor is it my place to do so...but if I'ma criticize a thing this hard, it's fair to offer at least one alternative, the "think you can do better, huh?" sorta thing. Hypothetically...if it was my decision to make? If I had a cube flinging/bouncing/merging game sitting in front of me, and my job was to name it? Here's one off the top of my head. Caromancy. See what I did there? Caromancy, from carom, a pool term referring to when the cue ball strikes multiple other balls in succession, which is very close to the gameplay here. And of course -mancy is what any fantasy setting school of magic appends to itself yea? I certainly like it better. But then, I'm no developer, or publisher, nor some corp goon with a marketing degree, nor a focus group...

/end overbearing volunteer creative consultant mode

Long and short... I think this game is equally as awesome and amazingly fun as its title is awful. And by now I think I've made both sides of that pretty clear 🤭

I picked this one up because I'm a sucker for a purple haired witch...that's literally it. I kept playing it long past the novelty of that tho, because this is actually a pretty good game! It's sorta like...a mashup of twin stick shooter and incremental. That is, the accumulation of meta progression enables you to further optimize the meta progression. In normal terms...it means that even if you're pretty much ass at bullet hell type games, you can enjoy playing this one =)

Not to be confused with an idle/clicker type game. This is absolutely an active game, but the progression loop is basically that you upgrade stuff, to allow you to farm resources faster, so you can upgrade more stuff, to farm resources even more faster, to upgrade more stuff, so that you can take on the next difficulty level, so that you can prestige and restart with permanent bonuses that increase the rate at which you can increase resource farming and game progression. That's where I'm getting "incremental" from, not because this bears any other striking resemblance to all those cookie cutter cookie clickers out there. This is not them. This is a bullet hell twin stick shooter featuring a purple haired witch (and two other playable characters too I guess), that also has an upgrade system that is best described as incremental.

"Purple haired witch Cookie Clicker?"

No. Purple haired witch exponential violence machine =) Or...

Make witch go brrr!

What I'm not so sure about, is the game describing itself as "looter shooter". You shoot things, yes. And there is loot, yes. Currency from monsters, used for upgrades, and an equippable item from bosses. Each boss has three item types it can drop, it will drop one of them. These come in a variety of rarities. I'm...not super sure I'd lump that mechanic together with say...Borderlands... Don't come into this expecting things to drop tons of procedurally generated gear for you to sift thru.

Super cute game, the soundtrack is pretty good too. 12 hours in and I've not yet unlocked everything or done everything. Partly maybe because I'm kinda ass at bullet hell games lol, but also because there really is enough here to engage with over that scale of time. There's a ton of weapons to unlock, and each one feels less like a linear upgrade to any other and much more like a different playstyle that you can specifically build around and play around.

Is this gonna be the gaming event of the year for anyone? Unlikely. Gaming event of the month? Eh... Gaming event of the next few days/weeks after you buy it? Possibly! I can however say with absolute confidence, that this is going to be without a doubt, the best indie twin stick/bullet hell/incremental mashup featuring a purple haired witch you have ever played before! Is that maybe a meaninglessly specific category? Maybe, but it still makes this a damn fine game for the price!

Early impressions... The premise here is basically "What if Wizardry, but Japan, and Lovecraft?". Developer clearly has some love for the old Wizardry games...or maybe something that was itself later inspired by Wizardry...and the Lovecraft mythos, and it absolutely shows here! Graphics and sound...are absolutely from that aesthetic. As in...the old Wizardry games, the graphics basically ended at "you can sorta tell what this thing was supposed to look like". That looks like it's become an intentional aesthetic here, and I kinda dig it!

Or there's the Wizardry-esque difficulty. Second encounter, first floor, one of my dudes got poisoned. And died. Get back to town...I don't have enough money to rez them... Very nostalgic, to me at least lol =) Might read as "unreasonably brutally difficult" to others lol =)

As for the use of ai... Look...I don't care if a game's development process was an immortal mountain sage hand carving each pixel over the last 500 years, or someone literally typing "Yo Codex, make me a game! A good one lol", or a AAA studio dumping millions of dollars and thousands of human hours into it... None of those tells me anything about whether or not the result is gonna be any fun to me. I've spent enough time fiddling with ai to know that no, it doesn't "make the thing for you"...because the thing about the anti-ai crowd...they basically stopped at "i don't like ai", and of course don't know the difficulties that one adds by including ai in the workflow. Is wrestling with an ai model for 500 hours less meaningful than spending 500 hours debugging a bit of code? I'll leave that one for the historians to solve...

More importantly, ai cannot provide a spark of inspiration. Nor can AAA studios most often. "Derivative unoriginal slop" can come from Bethesda, Disney, ai, or mountain sages that have worked on a game since before the dawn of computing. As can things that are reasonably original and fun.

This feels like someone definitely cared about making it. They'd have to right? This genre isn't exactly rife for cashgrabbing...unlike say...the spire-like genre...nor is the pricepoint. Honestly...I see way more heart in this project than the "4th quarter 2026 shareholders edition" of whatever game some AAA studio has remade/rebooted/reset/rehashed/rewarmed/ressurected/regurgitated at us lately. Someone truly cares about this thing, and used modern tools to enable them to create it in a reasonable time frame and budget. Is the result a little janky in spots? Sure. But I'm willing to accept some jank over bland, boring, uninspired yet highly polished AAA slop.

Microtransactions.

A fun tour of Japanese mythology! Which, in case ya didn't know...basically literally any everyday item can and does become haunted in Japanese folklore! A haunted robe? Check. Demonic support column? Absolutely! Some evil mud? Yup. Umbrella demon? Obviously! Haunted sandals? They're here too! Just to name a few... So apparently if I ever visit Japan, I need to not only be on the lookout for truck-kun and other portals to isekai land, I should also watch out for literally everything to be some manner of yokai!

Each of the three characters has a unique mechanic that...I at least...haven't already seen in other spire-likes...and I've played a ton of them... The upgrade system is very much spire-like, most upgrades seem to either increase the effects of a card by 50%, or reduce cost, or increase some of the character specific resources generated by the card by a point or few. They all feel meaningful and useful...or at least...as useful as any StS upgrades do.

The sound and art are both rather charming. Easy to look at, easy to listen to. I find myself smiling at some of the card art, and bopping along to the soundtrack. That's...about the best one can really expect there...

There are 3 different "stories" to go thru...they basicaly determine the run length and final boss. Neat thing about them tho, they each have their own unique difficulty modifiers that can be unlocked and applied. Not just "easy normal and hard", nor simply "a0 thru a20", unique and thematically suited modifiers! Like for instance, the first difficulty modifier for the yuki onna arc sticks you with a "permafrost" card in your starting deck. Not just some unrelated challenge, it actually fits the theme, I really like that part ♥

And for the price, I'm very well pleased with this game, hopefully you will be too!!

Edit: One other thing that really stands out here, is that you get full access to the shop at all times. Between fights, during fights...even during events. This adds an interesting gameplay layer, being able to add or remove cards (subject to availability and affordability) during combat is a really unique touch! The shop is likely also gonna be your main source of card upgrades and removals as well as companion slots, so be aware of that going in.

So ya remember those engagement farming things we all used to post to social media? "Would you rather fight 10 duck sized horses or 1 horse sized duck?", or "How many dudes would it take to beat up a gorilla?"...those kindsa things, remember them? Would you like to play a game built around those concepts?

If yes, then wow is this gonna be your jam!

You start out with one regular dude, fighting 10 toddlers. Or, there's an option to change that to teddy bears, if you'd rather not watch an adult man fist-punching 10 toddlers to death. From there, it escalates quickly, with more dudes, varied dudes, and increasingly absurd things to fight.

Art style and general vibe of it all? The first word that comes to mind is "Newgrounds". The look and feel of it is very reminiscent of the glory days of flash gaming, and I mean that in a good way!

Game has 100+ rounds per run...which might sound a bit much, until you realize that each round takes less than 10 seconds. Game has 3 difficulty levels. First is fairly easy...as long as your team of dudes mostly kinda follows basic party composition rules, you'll probably win. If not...you might have maybe misunderstood basic party composition rules...or gotten massively screwed by RNG. The easiest level is very much something you can just turn on and have some fun with, without needing too much mental bandwidth dedicated to it. The harder modes...are significantly more engaging, lemme say it that way...

Humor...lotta fart jokes, butt jokes, and the like. This is actually one area I feel could use some improvement. If we're gonna go that route of jokes, why not go with some ball jokes, some ♥♥♥♥ jokes, some boob jokes, etc? The game is, by design, a total sausagefest, so why not really lean into that? I dig 8th grade locker room kinda humor. Why stop at butt and fart jokes? Feels like a missed opportunity, very immersion breaking, totally undertuned, bad game design lol 🤭

Unlike most run based games, there doesn't seem to be the same level of crash, or comedown, after completing a run. Usually, finishing one run with your monstrously overpowered setup, only to begin again from nothing feels...feels bad. To me at least. I don't get that here. Maybe because I'm not having to actually control my team, I dunno, but it doesn't feel nearly as lackluster to begin a new run as it does in most run based games.

All in all, one of the better entries in the genre, and well worth the price ♥

It's like Luck Be A Landlord, but with a cauldron instead of a slot machine, far fewer communists, and way more witches ♥

Basically a reskinning of the Downfall mod for StS, but still worthwhile

Let's talk about depth. This game has it.

"How deep is it tho?" you may wonder...

You remember how the dwarves in Moria dug too deep?

"Oh, so it's THAT kinda deep!" No...let me finish. The dwarves got wiped out by a balrog they unearthed. But what was the balrog running from? See, the balrog had itself dug too deeply, and found this game, somewhere deeper than the earth's core. That's the depth I'm talking about. Deeper than Moria. Deeper than balrogs. Depth.

Fortunately the in game wiki explains everything pretty well, making the depths fathomable and fun!

If a nearly bottomless wuxia generational sandbox sounds appealing, then this is gonna be your jam!

The translation is passable, janky in the way that adds character and helps flavor the world. So if the occasional odd verb tense is a deal breaker for you....sucks for you.

One of the few word games that stays a word game the whole way through! Seems like most of these types quickly go from "what words can I spell with these letters" to "well, I have 3 chess pieces, a couple of fractions, a piece of sushi, a cat paw, 3 kanji, a quadrilinear equation, some greek letters, and a few emoji...which apparently spell some ridiculous word". While we do get wildcards here, they actually seem to add to the complexity rather than eliminate it.

Each encounter has its own distinct mechanics, which are also all built around words.

But! The game also doesn't expect you to be super great at this kind of game! Like...one character's unlock is "finish a run in under 45 minutes". Which to me usually means "I won't be unlocking this content"...I'm pretty bad at this kind of game, and don't find any joy in speedrunning. And yet! I actually managed to pull that off without even trying to!

The distinct 1984 aesthetic also made me reflect a bit... While I usually give thanks that we live in Brave New World rather than 1984...maybe that's just my own perception of things. Maybe other demographics feel differently...