Moves of the Diamond Hand is my favorite dice-rolling RPG since Disco Elysium, and it's somehow even weirder

In Moves of the Diamond Hand, I'm creeping around a sandwich deli's basement, avoiding the dog-man hybrid who's zonked out on the couch in front of news coverage of the city's depressing, all-encompassing mayoral election that may see a corporate controlled clone take office. Rolling a legion of six-sided dice, I re-tune the dog-man's cello to play a jaunty tune, and use my cooking instincts to flip the channel to soothing daytime TV.

Equipping my best outfit and a huge slice of pizza that'll give my dice some nifty bonuses, I prepare to wake the dog using a special medicine I had to smooth talk from a group of lunching clones upstairs. If I want to achieve my dream of becoming the city's best sandwich maker in order to join the circus, it'd be better to have this canine fellow on-side so I stand the best chance of claiming the premium deli ingredients protected by the hordes of music-loving venus flytraps nearby. This is just one tiny slice of the unhinged, wonderful chaos Moves of the Diamond Hand pushes me to do in my first few hours of early access, and the off-kilter charm is already cementing this RPG as an instant cult classic.

Roll or die trying

Moves of the Diamond Hand's off-beat comedy and dice-rolling system evolves on Cosmo D Studios' earlier work, The Norwood Suite and Betrayal at Club Low, but ratchets up the scale and freedom to weave your own path through its quests with a real immersive sim energy. Arriving in the city by train, you're given one ultimate goal: to join Circus X. How you choose to pursue doing so is up to you, but all the options revolve around mastering one of your seven skills. Cooking, for example, pushes you to impress the performance group with the perfect sandwich, while Deception revolves around becoming a master of disguise. Tonally, it's like if the serious cyberpunk edge of Deus Ex collided with a clown car.

Despite the constant chuckles, Moves of the Diamond Hand has a seriously well-oiled and unique RPG dice-rolling system. Like in Baldur's Gate 3, or Disco Elysium, each of your skills dictates how you roll against certain challenges, but the way you level up is by spending points to improve each face on the skill die, jacking up its numbers. Certain milestones can then add new faces to a skill-specific bonus dice as well, outfits and consumable items can add even more dice, and each challenge comes with its own special dice that can vary.

Fail a check, for instance, and in most cases you can try again, but will have to deal with a debuff dice such as Frustrated or Sore, or a character may become Wary. Rarely are these dice purely good or bad, with even some devastating dice having faces that might actually enhance your roll instead of scuppering it. With each challenge letting you re-roll multiple times, these are fast-paced clashes where you're often trying desperately to get a slight edge, always directly rolling your own dice pool against your opponent be they person, pigeon, or inanimate object.

It's a great, simple system that I already loved during my first hands-on with Moves of the Diamond Hand, and the early access launch already adds a lot more depth with loads of unique dice special effect die faces. Beyond numerical adjustments, dice can restore mental or physical damage, explode either your own or your opponent's bonus dice, swap values around, reset values, and many more. Sandwiches offer some of the best bonuses in the game, but usually come with big pros and cons, and always have to be re-rolled the maximum number of times with each dice face always applying to the overall score. Never before has my lunch become so important.

The dice challenges themselves are constant, and often wonderfully mundane. Almost every dialogue choice that pushes Moves of the Diamond Hand forward draws on one of your seven skills – you could use Cooking to strike up a conversation about what someone is drinking, for instance, or use your keen powers of Observation to glimpse what's in a book over someone's shoulder.

Likewise, skill checks are required for progression that can also be charmingly normal. One way to protect yourself from slipping on a bubble tea spill early on in the game is to simply be wise enough to accept the situation and be at peace with it.

Moves of the Diamond Hand's dense areas are filled with multiple paths to progress, characters with their own problems, and a whole load of objects to illicitly interact with and potentially stuff into your pockets. Each dice roll, success or failure, adds to your pool of skill points, so you're always progressing, and always encouraged to meddle with each strange area, from a cyclopean-lion-patrolled plaza in front of the library, to a jazz bar that's slowly replaced its famous house band as they've died off with replica clones who just aren't quite right.

Popping open car trunks to rifle through them for goodies while the giant owl guard isn't watching. Lifting keys to get access to the city's backrooms. Smooth-talking through conversations to turn anxious strangers into willing accomplices. Moves of the Diamond Hand feels like a dice-powered take on my favorite immersive sims.

I could spend several paragraphs listing the weird and wonderful events I've tackled in just a few hours lost in the world of this RPG and only just scratch the surface, while also sounding like I'm just making stuff up. Yes, you can wow the crowd while busking by turning your cello into a soup bowl. If you roll well enough, that is.

With a striking visual style, there's a feeling that anything might be possible thanks to how Moves of the Diamond Hand embraces a deliberate clash of visual styles. Mixing Garry's Mod-style warping with real-world textures, garish neon lighting, and larger-than-life architecture, Moves of the Diamond Hand really gets across the sense of a truly weird, cyberpunk world that wouldn't be out of place alongside Batman Forever's set design.

It avoids the uncanny valley pitfall by turning it into a knowing style, and then framing those moments to create interesting, striking visuals rather than feeling like a messy mish-mash of assets. Meanwhile, a maximalist user-interface only adds to the sense dice rolls are truly chaotic. Yes, the game looks like that, and is also beautiful. It's a real tonic for gaming's constant chasing of high-fidelity photorealism, and a reminder that exploring strange, bizarre worlds is one of the medium's greatest strengths.

Choosing a skill path towards Circus X at the beginning of Moves of the Diamond Hand, you're not actually locked in, and can find quest threads for the others as you continue to improve your skills. After all, each goal has its own bespoke quest chain. If you're looking to become a master of disguise, you may never plumb the depths of the deli's basement at all, instead searching for the crocodile-headed tailor who can help you create lavish new outfits.

Each quest chain feels so unique and engaging to pick apart that I'm already pursuing several at once, all while trying to juggle the mayoral election plot thread that ties everything together, and already making political enemies as I do so. Currently, I'm puzzling over what to do with a hacked, novelty talking bass, who is something of an emotional support pet for clone candidate Sonny Koln. The city's future may hinge on this fish.

In early access, Moves of the Diamond Hand includes the first two chapters, which span the train station opening and several locations across a city hub (which feels comparable in scope to something like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines' hubs). There are several sidequests to complete, though some have yet to be implemented. Somewhat refreshingly, though, any time you encounter these in-progress quests, a pop-up box appears to clearly tell you what to expect from what's there. Plus, the game's early access roadmap already plainly lays out the plan for each chapter's rollout across its proposed year of early access.

Moves of the Diamond Hand is so packed with content, that the openness about what's included means I'm rarely disappointed to find I can't progress further down certain rabbit holes just yet. Instead, it feels bursting with potential and possibilities even during this early access launch. One roll I won't have to make? Seeing if I'll come back for more. That's just a certainty at this point. Moves of the Diamond Hand is one of the strangest and most exciting RPGs I've played in years, and I'll be back to master the art of sandwich making in due time.

Moves of the Diamond hand is out now in early access on Steam.

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