If you want to explore a strange city, go play Moves Of The Diamond Hand

I am $999 in debt and I may be going insane, but at least my pockets are full of sandwiches. You too may attain bread-based nirvana if you play Moves Of The Diamond Hand, a new dice-rolling RPG from Cosmo D, although you don't need to follow me into the deathspiral of bankruptcy. I just enjoy becoming insolvent in any game that gives me the chance. My granny used to say: "They can't put you in jail for debt". She had roughly nine billion children to feed and I do not, but part of me carries her philosophy to the grave. And indeed past the grave! Into videogames.

But before I explain debt to you, I should explain this entire game. This is impossible, because it is a Cosmo D game. I'll settle for the basics. 

You arrive first-personally via subway train to Off-Peak City. It is the middle of an intense mayoral race, with everyone in town talking about three candidates. One is a clone who will fall to pieces if he doesn't have his companion fish robot with him at all times. Another is a former boy band member with a dodgy energy drink sponsorship. The third is a veteran politician with a self-published memoir, described as "solid" in such a manner that "solid" feels like a synonym for "pointless". Everyone in town is pinning their hopes, cash, and ill motives on whichever political shyster is best for them. Your job? To make pizza and hang out!

Well, sort of. This is an open-ended RPG in the sense that you can choose, very early, a goal to focus on (I decided to run for city council). But you will be making a lot of pizza too, for dice-based reasons I'll soon explain. There are sub-plots that have you supporting or sabotaging the various politicians, and a main story that shoves you toward joining a highly respected organisation called Circus X, even though you are - look at you - an absolute slob.

While the storytelling blends pedestrian local politics and monstrous cloning technology into a kind of avocado smash of comedy sci-fi, a lot of the time you're really engaging with a chunky dice tossing minigame. Every small interaction with a character or piece of environment might prompt a dicey encounter. The first thing that happens while departing the subway train is that you step onto a wet platform covered in spilled boba tea. You must roll to escape injury. It's your dice versus the tea's dice. 

So a little bit DnD, a little bit Yahtzee. But you have to stack that cup of dice in your favour as much as possible before upending it. Your stats (cooking, wit, deception, physique, music, observation) will determine how good your basic rolls can get. This upgradey system of stats will be familiar to anyone who has played the creator's previous game, Betrayal At Club Low. The encounters work in a similar way, with extra dice being granted thanks to consumable treats like gum, fizzy drinks, and - aha - many cookable pizzas, which are basically dice that you can bake yourself.

Special outfits also buff your stats (a chef's jacket, a leather trenchcoat, a hi-vis vest) but these get dirty and need to be washed after a few uses. And where there are dice, there are debuffs. Failed rolls give you a temporary status like "Too Confident" or "Ashamed", cursing subsequent rolls with negative numbers. 

This is also what debt is. A few hours into my misadventure, I walked up to a machine in a laundromat that displayed the bright glowing phrase "MICRO-LOANS!" thinking, wow, what an amenable piece of machinery, to just give away all this money like that. With $999 dollars, I can buy all the dice-buffing gum, sandwiches, and suits I like. Unfortunately, this also saddled me with a hellish red dice that lowers my rolls wherever I go until I pay off the loan. Sometimes, rather than nerfing my rolls, it deals me crippling psychic damage instead and I die. 

Failure in a roll usually lets you carry on though. I got tired of trying to soothe a rude fishbot at one point, after flubbing multiple rolls, and simply grabbed it prematurely. The robotrout self-vaporised, and now I have to live with the consequences because the fish is an important quest item. I keep showing its skeleton to everyone, and they are never pleased. 

These are the moments Diamond Hand is worth playing for. The dice-based engine powers the game, like a chuggy diesel generator putting out far more watts than it has any god-given right to do. But it's never the most interesting thing about Cosmo D's urban wilderness. When describing this developer's games, I'll sometimes use the words "surreal" or "absurd" or, if I'm really tired, "weird". But these minimise the true appeal of these virtual holidays from normality, and don't sufficiently describe the alternate urban societies that emerge from the mannequin-like character animation and jaunty-angled redbricks. These games swerve to avoid cliché wherever they can, unless it is funnier to roadram straight through it.

You are stepping into a lucid dream of New York City, where giant pigeons are cloned into guardsmen and library cards are a precious commodity, yet it is all knitted together as an elaborate fabric of logical connections, motives, and misgivings. A "security lion" who patrols public pianos so nobody can play might seem weird at first, but it makes sense once you hear the dreamlike reasoning and accept such things as just another knot in this city's plausibility quipu. 

This is the case right from the opening zone, a subway station dense with brief quests and favours to fulfill. I remember playing the opening hours of Starfield, and being mildly despondent that one of the biggest, most well-funded businesses in the games industry could not manage to muster even a single sci-fi side quest with any unusual characters or inviting intrigue. Growing up on ye olde Bethesda nonsense, I have a continued craving for weird tales and curious events in open worlds filled with NPCs. But such worlds are harder and harder to find. If you too are missing this from your first-person 'splorers, you can do no better than indulging in this place. It is smaller land, with an entirely different approach to set dressing, physical space, and conversational logic. But kill me stone dead if it does not offer quests that are actually funny and curiosity-driven.

I would tentatively call it an immersive sim, where it not lacking both a jump button and a crouch button. Not only does the small-scale city block setting evoke the eternal immerso-sim dream game, there are also often multiple routes to get what you need. You can hide in clouds of stinking vapour from patrolling clonebeasts (though you'll gain a negative status called "Trash Aroma", of course). You can pickpocket people, or play music for them. Quest-giving ne'er-do-wells will present you with multiple options. Stump for one of the three mayoral candidates to affect the polls on screens around town. Or investigate any of the candidates on behalf of the journalists hanging out in a deli down the avenue. Convince the recruiter at the circus you have what it takes to perform, or find a clandestine costume to sneak backstage without his permission. I started playing Moves Of The Diamond Hand thinking, "Ah a Cosmo D game, I can play this for an hour or two and write it up in a jiffy, a nice short game from a game maker known for nice short games." What a fucking IDIOT.

This time it is a much chunkier, fully-fledgified role-player of dialogue and deception, with a sludgy urban hub world connecting subway CCTV rooms, backstage circus lounges, deli cellars, and gossip barges. The streets and buildings are full of glowing-eyed clones, gator-bonced deviants, and innumerable other miscreants who aren't afraid to clatter their voice at you like you are a snotty child wondering why the world is the way it has always been: jazzy.

It is a little land of comic detail, and it takes any and every chance to hide a gag or an oddity. The medium difficulty setting is named: "It is what it is". The dialogue text is accompanied not by the "wibble blibble flibble" noises of localisation dodging speech effects a la Animal Crossing or The Sims, but by an SFX cocktail of clangs, door slams, splashes, and myriad other sounds. One musician rolls out their words to the sporadic sounds of bottlecap-opening fizzes, clinking glass, and liquid pouring into a vessel. Just listening to this character talk is like drinking a cold beer. 

Not five minutes passed before I was grinning from ear to ear at this game's soundscape and wordscape. The thought bubbles and pop-ups give interior comic-bookish context to everything around you, like a first-person graphic novel full of brisk humour and unreal wonder. I am a big fan of the bizarre becoming rooted to some recognisable phrase or observance of reality. So it is for the same reason I loved Anthology of the Killer enough to review it two years late, that I am made reliably giddy with every game of Cosmo D's that I play. 

The only major caveats I have to offer are that the game remains unfinished. It currently contains two chapters of early access antics, out of a planned 5-6 chapter game, with new areas to come such as "Building 18" and "the Big Library". It's also possible to get into a dice-throwing fugue state, whereby you think winning these rolls is the point of the game. It is not. But the aura of chance cubes is powerful, and the human brain weak. So I have found myself once or twice or maybe even three times fart-noising at the harder dice encounters, wishing that I could just eat the tasty dialogue without having to gamble for it. If you are one to get distracted by systems, you will likely feel this tension too.

It hasn't stopped me from laughing - that's the important thing. Let me try and spin up a little metaphor here, as a parting thought. At one point in the game you need to get to a train platform. But there's a rope that is "surprisingly effective" as a barrier - basically one of those flimsy rope barriers you'd see in any cinema queue. You can use your observation skills to notice something unusual about this rope. Or you could use your cooking skill to "taste the rope with your tongue". You go through a lot of trouble to conquer this glowing pink bigstring, an obstacle as challenging as any other dice-bound encounter. And yet, when it falls away, you are told that nobody notices, nobody cares. 

The message: Authoritative norms are only as intimidating and flimsy as a rope on a pole in any nightclub or museum. The "best practices" of game design are likewise entirely invented limitations, flimsy and unattended by any security guard or bouncer. For years now, Cosmo D has been lowering that red VIP rope and just waltzing through, making walking sims and pizza delivery games without much care for what is "polished" or ""correct"" or """good""", and it has every time resulted in something worth playing. Moves Of The Diamond Hand isn't fully baked, but it is already the freshest Off-Peak City has ever smelled.