I rolled Noel: The Mortal Fate and I’ve been poking through it. I doubt I could finish it this month and I don’t want to do another book club. So, I decided to write about something I’ve casually been playing on the side, like I did with Storyteller: Slice & Dice!

Slice & Dice is a 2024 game by Tann. It’s a roguelike turn-based RPG where the luck based aspect of roguelikes is made more explicit: almost everything is decided by everyone rolling dice. Make the most of what you roll, and maybe you’ll reach the end of the run.

Start a run and you’re given an assortment of characters. They start out obeying typical fantasy archetypes, like the yellow guy being a standard fighter RPG character. Decent, but nothing too special. But after a fight, you’ll get the chance to upgrade a character to a different class. That fighter could become a gladiator with strong opening attacks and shields alongside attacks, or become a weirder scrapper that gets stronger the more the enemy team is hurt and the more shields he has. Your basic red healer girl? She could become a vampire that can sustain herself along with her teammates, and may soon could become a demon lord forsaken that could revive allies that were downed.

Everyone still obeys the dice, and within Slice & Dice‘s simple framework, you can wind up with parties that are weird and experimental. Catch me rolling extra reroll cantrips as the bard, it’s my keys to heaven. The game especially gets more experimental if you play a party with a green party member (who are just Weird) or party members with randomly generated dice.

But yeah, how about that dice game?

Slice & Dice has you going through a gauntlet of twenty fights with monsters typical for RPGs. Enemies make their rolls and declare who they’re going to use their attacks on, then you make your own rolls. Unless you have a certain blessing on easy mode, a curse on hard mode, or don’t land on a reroll cantrip, you only get three rolls with each character’s die. You can distribute dice you want to play and roll on if everyone else has shit rolls.

Then you use up everyone’s actions before the enemy team acts. You can freely undo actions you take so you can figure out the best usage of what you got, so Slice & Dice isn’t demanding. If you build up mana, you can use spells based on which specific magic characters you got. Though, the game won’t let you store a lot of mana, so unless you rolled a move that scales with how much mana you have, just go ham with magic.

Everyone that lives moves on to the next round fully recovered, but everyone that was downed are revived at half health. Because of this, it’s likely for them to get downed again pretty fast. So, the smartest way to play Slice & Dice is to keep everyone alive since things could domino toward failure. Don’t need to fully heal everyone, just keep them kicking. The healing spell that refunds mana if the heal prevents someone from dying on the enemy turn that you can use over and over? That’s the good stuff.

Slice & Dice is also pretty minimalist when it comes to visuals. All the party members and enemies have portraits, but nothing else beyond their one picture. The dice are simple 3D models, but the 3D models dictating the actions of 2D beings kinda lends a grander fare to the action. Music is simple calm fare befitting the game, but ehhh, this was absolutely one of those games you play while listening to something else or watching something. I played this on the Steam Deck with the Drakengard soundtrack playing, it was sick. I felt deranged.

Is Slice & Dice a bad game? Nah. In fact, it’s a great game. But talking personally, I don’t think Slice & Dice will stick with me? I’ve really been drifting away from roguelikes and open world games lately. Balatro was my obsession and I still respect it, but I really can’t bring myself to play it much lately.

With my health and need to find work I could physically do, I’ve been wanting to spend my time better. Cool, a game that could give at least a hundred hours of playtime. But how many of those hours will be worth it? I want a meaningful end in sight, not a void where I wander around for happiness.

I see Slice & Dice offering different modes of play. I played this fun mode that doubled your characters and the enemies, and I liked it. But now what? Do I play that on the harder difficulties? Do I play a different mode? It takes about an hour to do a successful run and… it just has me thinking, I could have been doing something else with that hour. This was fun, but it’s not going to stick to me.

Slice & Dice is a time sink – a pretty damn good time sink – but still just a time sink. It’s a really good game, but it’s just not my kind of game anymore.

Regarding this site, I should share stuff I’ve kept on bluesky. As said before, I rolled Noel: The Mortal Fate… which means that I cleared two lines! Waow!

So, I made a second bingo card. It includes stuff I still want to play, new stuff, and a free space. Storyteller and Slice & Dice were things I casually played, but I won’t play anything else until I finish Noel.

(Some of the old stuff got really damn lucky with the random number generator I used too decide order, wow)