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Steam Next Fest is always a good place to find a new roguelike to suck up your free time, and this time around has proved no exception. I've already checked out Tears of Metal, and while Half Sword doesn't sell itself on being a part of the genre, its demo certainly fits the bill. But the clear winner so far in my mind is Slots & Daggers - a game I only discovered thanks to a roguelike I fell in love with in the last Next Fest.
That game was CloverPit, which is a slot machine twist on the Balatro format, and has been racking up hundreds of thousands of sales since its recent release. My obsession with that put Slots & Daggers on my radar, because while it's a very different kind of slot machine roguelike, it's still a slot machine roguelike, albeit with a fantasy twist.
Slots & Daggers plays out as though you're in a pub, tinkering away at a simple arcade machine embedded in your table. At the start of the game, you're given three tokens, denoting a sword, a shield, and a coin, and sent out to fight monsters. Combat borrows from Slay the Spire - you know exactly what each monster will do on their turn, and that each of their hits will probably hurt a little more than the one before.
But while the strategic element of Slay the Spire lies in your ability to pull the right card from your deck, Slots & Daggers does away with that. Instead, it puts your chosen tokens into a slot machine, and whatever lady luck gives you when you press the button is what happens on your turn. In the face of a deadly attack, you might pull three swords and get off a huge amount of crit damage to see off your foe… but you might also pull two coins and a shield and get cruelly dispatched instead.
You can tip the scales in your favor with new tiles as well as passive and active effects that play out in-between rounds. Eventually, I began crafting my build around a pair of 'skillcheck' weapons - a broadsword and a mace that based their damage off how well you could do in a minigame - and regularly opted for healing in my passives, picking up passive lifesteal and active healing spells to keep me alive. But in one run, I opted instead to hit the enemies with my wallet, taking more and more money-based upgrades so that by the time I reached the demo's final boss I could afford pretty much anything I could find in the shop.
There's an element of making your own luck. Granted, you might simply not find the pulls you need and be consigned to the game over screen, but much as in a more traditional roguelike, death is usually the end result of simply not having the gear to match up to a given enemy. Within Slots & Daggers' retro aesthetic and vaguely tabletop approach to exploration and monster design, that never feels quite as bad as it did in Slay the Spire. There's a sense of distance inherent in the fact that you're playing this game within a game, with the random chance meaning that while loss often feels out of your control, you simply have to acknowledge that them's the breaks.
But making my own luck quickly proved crucial. Slots & Daggers offers up chips at the end of each fight, and those chips can be used to upgrade your machine. In the demo, those upgrades are pretty minor, offering small boosts to damage resistance and healing. Unless, that is, you're prepared to save up the cost of 10 normal upgrades to buy the big one, which unlocks a fourth slot. More slots means better results, so obviously I saved up all my chips, bought the fourth slot, and then did it all again to buy a fifth slot. I would've bought more, too, but the demo cut me off.
That was probably for the best, because five slots meant I could dish out so much pain to my enemies that I promptly discovered I'd beaten everything the demo had to offer. That also meant that there was no real point in investing in the other upgrades, cutting my time with Slots & Daggers far shorter than I intended. That's a bit of a shame, but probably for the best, because if, as I suspect, this game takes up anywhere near as much time as Balatro and CloverPit have, then I'm going to be seeing plenty of it in my future anyway.
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