Within five minutes of starting Moves of the Diamond Hand, I had avoided slipping in a bubble tea goo slick by passing a skill check to lick it; confronted some big, mutant pigeons (and had my keister handed to me); and fixed a broken computer by smelling it to determine that a piece of red pepper was wedged in the disc drive. I specced hard into Cooking — one of seven available skills — and that comes in handy more often than you would expect. Hence the goo, red pepper, and several other edible items I saw in the three hours I spent making my way through the first chapter of this gonzo first-person RPG.
An Introduction To Off-Peak
That isn’t surprising if you’ve followed developer Cosmo D’s prior work, where food has always been important. In his first commercial game, Off-Peak, a ramen chef rhapsodized about his culinary process, comparing each ingredient to a musical instrument. In his follow-up The Norwood Suite, a key quest involved tracking down ingredients for a sandwich. And, in the game that put him on my radar, Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1, you went undercover at a pizza shop, and spent time making and delivering pies to the inhabitants of one bizarre city block.
Cosmo D started with Saturn V, which you can find free on itch.io. It serves as a cool proof of concept of the style he would later define in the Off-Peak games.
Across those games, Cosmo D built a strange, surreal world where commerce collides with creativity like a foot stomping into a puddle of boba. Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite, and Tales from Off-Peak City were all the kind of low-impact adventure game you might refer to as a walking sim. All were in first-person, and Cosmo D drenched every bit of your field of view in style.
But with Betrayal at Club Low, Cosmo D pulled his camera out for the first time for an isometric RPG in which you attempted to infiltrate the exclusive spot namechecked in the title. It was the first game he had made that went as deep on mechanics as it did on aesthetics, with an emphasis on collecting dice (made from pizza ingredients) and leveling up stats. Being a Cosmo D game, those stats were still in esoteric abilities like cooking and music, but it was a left turn nonetheless.
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Moves Of The Diamond Hand Brings It All Together
With Moves of the Diamond Hand, Cosmo D is bringing both worlds together. I breathed a sigh of relief when I started the game and saw that it was in first-person. Cosmo D’s games have always had a palpable sense of atmosphere and, though I liked Club Low, that just doesn’t come across as powerfully when viewed from above. The perspective has changed with Diamond Hand, but the mechanics here build on what Club Low introduced, weaving the threads together to create a game that fuses his developing focus on roleplay with his gift for creating surreal, immersive environments.
You begin the first chapter on a train, arriving in the city in an attempt to join Circus X, a legendary troupe that has returned to the town for the first time in years. You can pick one of seven quests to take you there, each corresponding to one of the skills. Each quest will bring you to a different part of the city. When I chose the Cooking route, my goal was to get to a deli, but in the Deception route, I needed to find a dry-cleaning establishment to learn to become a Master of Disguise. Those pursuits are beyond the purview of this first chapter, though. Here, you have more pressing concerns. An important object known as the Jade Bass has been stolen, and you won’t be able to exit the train station until you find it.
Dice To Meet You
To do that, you need to talk to people, gaining experience to upgrade your skills by squaring up in dice battles. Each skill check involves a dice roll, where the objective is presented as an opposing roll. As you improve your skills, your dice get better, and you can also temporarily improve your skills with food and drink. In the case of a tie, you win.
There are three suspected Jade Bass thieves in the station, and each requires a different approach. One won’t talk to you unless you’re sharing a slice of pizza. Another seems suspicious, but insists he’s just there to canvas for his political candidate of choice. They all seem to be hiding something which you can only unearth by matching your dice against theirs.
Though the train station is only a fraction of what will be available in the full game, it’s a moody introduction, with smoke in the air, red liquid bubbling in red glass pillars, and muscular goons blocking the exit until a private eye arrives to find the Jade Bass. Setting can make or break a first-person RPG, and most tend to stick to tried-and-true worlds that we’ve seen before like medieval Europe, or fantasy medieval Europe, or post-apocalyptic America.
In that way, Moves of the Diamond Hand reminds me of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Troika’s cult hit urban fantasy RPG set in a Los Angeles where vampires walk the streets at night and dance to industrial music in darkly lit clubs. Getting a truly strange setting in a first-person RPG is rare, and Cosmo D looks like he may be delivering one of the best since VTMB. Time will tell, but I’ll be there to chow down on every new course.
Chapter One is available now as a demo ahead of a forthcoming paid Early Access launch.