One of the most wonderful things about indie games is the sheer variety of them on offer, and each and every one is essentially a distillation of the mind and aesthetic sensibilities of its creator, meaning there are as many truly unique indie games as there are developers. This is especially true for solo developers or small teams with a clear creative lead.
This is something you don’t always get in the AAA space, in which many hands are involved in the development process, and most of the games – which are, by all accounts, rather costly to make – must appeal to as many different types of people as possible in order to make lots of money for the lovely executives who greenlit them. This means that any visual or gameplay idiosyncrasies are all too often ironed out in the development process or that there was no space for them to bloom in the first place. This is not to say that there’s no creativity at bigger studios, just that they can often be more risk-averse and reluctant to pursue potentially niche artistic choices when the bottom line is always looming on the horizon.
However, this additional artistic freedom enjoyed by indie developers – the freedom to put more of themselves and their own sensibilities into their passion projects – can sometimes lead, in turn, to stronger reactions in players. Although the bland, safe AAA/inventive, avant-garde indie game dichotomy is obviously far too simplistic, it’s also true that, for instance, most photorealistic open-world action-adventure games don’t generally generate strong aesthetic responses, one way or the other, from most players, and certainly not from me. Just as we can’t like or relate to everyone we meet, we can’t love every indie game we play. But we wouldn’t want it any other way.
This brings me to Moves of the Diamond Hand, which was released in Early Access this week. The art style in this unusual first-person RPG, which draws heavily from tabletop RPGs, is certainly highly individualistic. Unfortunately, I was not enamoured by its visuals or its gameplay loop.
The surreal art is intentionally messy, piecemeal and homemade-looking. Character models are bizarre: distorted real-looking faces ‘misplaced’ on erroneous bodies; human bodies with the heads of pigeons; a talking green lion with a giant eye for a face. Cloning is a main theme in the game, so all this makes sense in the context of the fictional world, but I found it unsightly and perhaps even performatively ‘bizarre’, like the game is foregrounding its wacky alternative credentials and its postmodern rejection of conventionally beautiful art. Put simply, the visual design failed to capture my imagination.
The Early Access build features the first two chapters of the game (each being a kind of mini open world). The first chapter is set in a train station, from which you must escape out into the hipstery neighbourhood (a single block) of an uncannily strange city, which is the setting for the second chapter. These architectural spaces are realistic in terms of how they are laid out and how you traverse them, but with surrealist flourishes here, there and everywhere, such as a giant hand looming above a building, bizarre statues and oversized mutated pigeons milling about. The nighttime street scenes – the first two chapters are set over one night – look decent: neon lights dazzling the eye and an eerie night sky looming overhead. The languorous jazzy soundtrack is excellent; it hooked me right from the title screen and is definitely my favourite thing about this game.
Before discussing the gameplay, it might be useful to admit here that I am not familiar with tabletop RPGs and their complex dice mechanics, which this game fully embraces. This, while not an inherent fault in the game itself, was almost certainly a hindrance to my enjoyment. It’s also a game that’s built for repeated playthroughs, each one offering players the chance to follow different paths and to focus on different character builds. I played for eight and a half hours and reached the end of chapter two but didn’t quite complete it.
The first thing to say is that there’s a lot of dice play in the game. A lot. There are so many dice. So many. Every time I’ve closed my eyes over the past week or so I’ve seen them dancing behind my eyelids. The main dice you’ll use represent seven core skills on your character sheet – cooking, deception, music, observation, physique, wisdom and wit – which you upgrade with XP points (earned by winning dice battles, doing musical performances, having conversations and numerous other interactions).
Just about every kind of interaction involves dice, and the building up of the different skills on your character sheet, which in turn gives you a better chance to win future encounters. But chance is the key word here; as you’d expect, luck and RNG (random number generation) play a big part in your success or failure. There are also separate crafting dice: for cooking, for cleaning clothes, for everything. It’s dice all the way down!
If you like dice mechanics, you’re in for a treat. However, a lot of rather intrusive tutorialisation is needed to explain all the different mechanics and effects of these myriad dice, including all the clothing and food dice. And then there are all the ‘conditions’ you can develop during encounters, plus the nerve and health meters and the rest. It’s a complicated game, especially for the uninitiated, like myself. There’s thus a lot of explaining to be done by all the mini-tutorials.
But a bigger problem for me was the grind needed to build up the numbers on your core character sheet dice, which is most definitely needed if you have any hope of winning key encounters. But even after grinding your numbers up, it still feels like progression often comes down to luck – to the dreaded RNG. I was thankful that the game has difficulty options, but even on the second easiest, the grind required to get my numbers up soon drained me. This doesn’t feel like an issue that can be balanced out during early access so much as a fundamental part of the experience.
There certainly seems to be a disjunction between the old-fashioned, grindy gameplay and the avant-garde visuals and (ostensible) experimental sensibility of the game. The grind and the RNG cycle were made all the worse by my inability to relate to, and connect with, the storytelling and the fictional world.
The narrative backbone of the story certainly has potential. There’s a mayoral election happening in the city, in which clone rights are a central issue. You get to know the three candidates through posters, speeches, canvassers and conversations. Behind all this is the shadowy figure of The Diamond Hand, perhaps manipulating events from the shadows. The depiction of the election is more playful and silly than satirical, at least in these first two chapters, which feels like a missed opportunity. You talk to a lot of people, but I soon found myself skimming through these conversations, which often felt insubstantial. The writing is functional, veering on expositional at times (especially so with all the tutorials inserting themselves everywhere), and lacks vibrancy. Its trendily offbeat tone failed to engage me.
You get to know the world by completing a whole bunch of quests and side quests. The drop-down menu – which verbosely describes the primary goals, the secondary goals and the location goals – soon fills up and feels overwhelming. The world is small, but it’s certainly a dense place. Perhaps too dense. I often felt claustrophobic, a prisoner of the grind and the RNG dice mechanics.
This is perhaps a game for people who love tabletop RPGs, providing a new aesthetic twist on the traditional fantasy settings usually associated with them. It will also be of interest to people who enjoyed the developer’s previous games (Cosmo D clearly has a unique sensibility). Unfortunately, I fall into neither of these categories, and my meeting with this particular indie developer is not the beginning of a beautiful friendship, although I’m very grateful that this strange game exists and forms part of our wonderfully diverse indie ecosystem.
* I experienced two hard locks during my playtime but noticed lots of patching work being done. I expect the game will be stable by the time of the official EA release. It plays very well on the Steam Deck.
