Among fighting game developers, one stands out as more damp and weird than the others. Their carapace is more mottled, their palps somehow more pedi than the rest. Arc System Works! We've been fans of their fermented, piquant takes on the genre for a while and were delighted to see they'd managed to enter the 3D era without giving up the incredible silhouettes of their 2D heritage. Gabriel thought he might sip the summerwine one last time with Marvel Tokon, as he had in the days of his exultant youth, but he says that he washed out during the tutorial. I don't have the game, so I don't know what that would even look like, but the tutorial for 2XKO was perverse enough that I might be able to guess. It was like Operant Conditioning, like I was gonna have to falsify some number of lights at some point or murder a public figure. I didn't even dislike it, necessarily! But it did feel like I was being psychologically terraformed by a force alien to our Earth.
I've got my eye on a couple things out there which may enrich you. The first is in the vein of my normal bullshit, which is firmly derived from my usual Roguelite haunts. I've reached the same threshold that a romantasy reader must experience occasionally, where if it is something I can get on a normal shelf I don't want it. Only self-published Kindle filth will sate; genres without names yet, musky lairs . It's gotta have some other thing going on. I've found the Roguelite equivalents of cowboy chocolatier anteater mpreg surrogacy.
First up, Rune Dice. You don't gotta tell me, dude - the name is not good. I know. If it hadn't had a demo up during one of those kaleidoscopic Steam "fests," who knows if I'd have twenty hours in it by now. The centaur alphahole aspect is that it does what it does with dice. I guess that probably follows logically. There a few games who have tried to go in a dice direction, Dicey Dungeons being one my my favorite, and there are a few that turn around crafting individual dice out of faces - Slice & Dice is absolutely stellar everywhere I've played it.
Rune Dice doesn't go in for any of that. The reverse harem angle here is that it's about flicking smooth dice in a tray. Specifically, six sided dice - and each of the classes in its RPG conceit has its own special icons, artifacts, all the stuff you'd expect. What you don't expect is that when you flick a die with a One on it into another die with a One on it, it jumps up in the air as a newborn Two die, actively seeking another Two Die. Should they meet, well, I think you get the picture. These dice popping up and landing and jumping, piling up combos, I mean, I've seen it a lot over twenty hours. It gets a ton of its interest out of these physical interactions, which were tuned further in a thoughtful new update. If I were you, I'd just try that demo they got.
I saw some complaints that sometimes the dice didn't do what you want, and I was sorta like, well, yeah. Everybody already knows that about dice. Go tell your fuckin' mom.
(CW)TB out.
