REVIEW // Slots & Daggers brings its bite-sized, roguelike game of luck to PS5

There are quite a few parallels to be drawn between certain flavours of rogue-ish video game and the psychological tricks used to compel human beings into habitual gambling. And there are certainly many folks much smarter than I am offering insight and conducting research into the how, why, and whether or not we should be concerned about that.

Slots & Daggers, from developer Friedemann – who also made the wonderful and entirely diametric Summerhouse – is not at all disguising its casino-like inspirations, and in fact it openly embraces them as a way to distil the lizard brain-tickling phenomena of rogue-ish games into a tiny morsel of indulgence. It’s a game that’s mercifully quick to complete, giving you a hit of the high that the likes of Balatro promise only the most dedicated, and then shutting its doors before you can develop a problem.

The idea is devilishly simple. You are playing an abridged version of a fantasy roguelike adventure, complete with crudely-drawn enemies to battle as you work your way toward some poetically-vapid RPG nonsense goal, only it all plays out within the tiny, monochromatic screen of a steampunk-esque slot machine. Everything that must be done in the context of an RPG, be it attacking, defending, casting magic spells, earning gold coins, all of it is decided by spinning the slots and hoping to land on whatever icons are most useful at the time – preferably in multiples.

Nuance comes from the rogue-y stuff, with death resetting your run but handing out currency to spend on permanent upgrades, and each run offering randomised gear and upgrades with which to form a strategy to tackle the challenges ahead. What’s beautiful about all of this is that, aside from a few weapons that ask you to complete a quick skill check minigame in order to unleash their full potential, the vast majority of your success in Slots & Daggers is down to luck. Which might sound more frustrating than helpful, certainly at times it is, but it’s also quite liberating to be free of the pressure of mechanical skill and know that some failures are just not on you.

There’s also a fun bit of buildcrafting to be done to then counter the randomness of it all, and steel yourself for future setbacks. This game shouldn’t take most players more than a few hours to conquer (the goal is to reach the end of a small series of points on a map, and there aren’t that many of them), so new items and ideas come thick and fast, which helps prevent any kind of tedium or exasperation from losses along the way. It’s a really neat encapsulation of a blend of genres that’s good for a cheeky afternoon of spinning slots and killing beasties, plus there’s a more challenging post-game mode if you do want to eke out a little more content from it.

It’s got all the presentational chops of its peers, too, with a distinct pixel-art virtual table setting that shakes and thumps along with your actions to really emphasise those barbs of dopamine. It’s all quite drab, but the striking colour palettes of each new ‘biome’ against the bland backdrop do well to sell the progress of your journey. The soundtrack that mixes pseudo-RPG fare with lo-fi hip hop beats on filthy drum machines is, frankly, superb.

The only trouble with how successfully Slots & Daggers apes the casino-like rogues that dominate the indie games scene, is that it could have been a fantastic vehicle for deeper exploration or even criticism of how these games operate. That’s not to say a wrong choice was made, as a solo dev making passion projects I can understand why Friedemann would be perfectly happy with “silly, bite-sized version of thing I love,” but the idea of that potential never left my mind while I played.

Reviewed on PS5 Pro | Review copy supplied by publisher