I don’t want to get too negative about everything, but with videogames, in general, it feels like there’s this weird paradox. They look more and more realistic – poly counts, high-resolution textures, better physics, whatever – but correlative (or anti-correlative) to that visual fidelity, it’s like videogames are less and less interested with actual reality. It’s all fantasy. All sci-fi. All open-world, consequence-free abandon. And all that’s fine, in measured doses, but these genres and these experiences have become the staples of the videogamer diet: escapism at 60 frames per second in 4K resolution.
Greg Heffernan, better known by his ‘stage’ name Cosmo D, makes games the other way around. Visually, they’re abstract, absurdist, supernatural – maximalist caricatures of cities and people. But he’s more in touch with life and ‘being’ than any other game maker I know. Trained as a musician and a composer, he was originally one-third of an electronic jazz band called Archie Pelago. He started making games after he broke his leg – confined to his bed and his apartment for months, he taught himself on Unity, and released an experimental showcase called Saturn V and then, in 2015, his first major game, Off-Peak.
For the last decade, Heffernan has developed his aesthetic and his dice-based RPG-esque mechanics across three other games: The Norwood Suite, Tales From Off-Peak City, and Betrayal At Club Low, all of which have more than a 95% positive rating on Steam. Now Heffernan is back with Moves of the Diamond Hand.
Heffernan’s games are connected – they take place in the same world, joined by characters, events, and locations. He also has an established and recognizable style. The games are about music, food, and spending time with friends. They all take place at night. There’s a constant tension between art and commerce; pondering big thoughts or indulging in small pleasures.
Heffernan’s work is playful and expressive – I think he’s the greatest level designer in the world, insofar as he works with, not against, the inherent strangeness of game-making tools. If you made a character’s hands bigger than their head, a lot of designers might call that a mistake. Heffernan leans into the freedom and infinitude of the game engine. If these are tools that let you create anything, why pull the aesthetic down to earth?
But while their worlds are abstract and expressionistic, thematically, Heffernan’s games are deeply rooted in the everyday and the human. Off-Peak, ultimately, is about getting something to eat and catching a train. The Norwood Suite takes place in a hotel, where people come to drink, play board games, and trade stories about their work. In Tales From Off-Peak City, the only real ‘mechanic’ is making and delivering pizzas – you knead the dough, choose the topics, and then courier your pizzas around the neighborhood. Betrayal at Club Low is based on the erstwhile Glasslands Gallery nightclub in New York City.
And it’s at this intersection, between playful imagination and lived-in realism, that you find Moves of the Diamond Hand. You’re a struggling artist who wants to join the venerated Circus X. Beginning in a train station, you explore a small urban borough. Some people want to hear you sing. Others want to tell you about their day. In the background, a local election is coming.
Like any classical RPG, every interaction is decided by dice rolls – whether you’ve been spotted trespassing by the station’s pigeon-human hybrid security guard and need to talk your way out of a beating, or you’re asking a street musician where he got his saxophone, you can choose different dice, buff them with items, and, in the style of Yahtzee, swap two out after your turn and re-roll. It’s more mechanics-driven than any of Heffernan’s previous games, but the mood and atmosphere are as strong as ever. It feels like he’s refined the aesthetic, and now he’s perfecting the gameplay, and videogamisms, to match his world.
“I’m going to try and give you this gameplay with as smooth a delivery as possible,” Heffernan tells me in a PCGamesN interview. “It’s like you’re a chef. Here’s a nice dish I’ve been cooking up. Give it a taste. The structure of it is more deliberately a game, in the sense that there’s a fail state. You can lose; you can be in a situation where you’re stuck. It was a real leap of faith. But this is like my sweet spot. Disco Elysium was a big moment, in terms of wanting to make a game that was non-violent but still had a lot of tension and strategy. I have a Pavlovian response. When I see dice, I want to check those games out.”
Go back and play Saturn V, and then work your way through Heffernan’s games in order, and you can follow his development as a game creator. Originally, it was just about building a place, populating it, and giving the player some kind of incentive to look around. By the time you (and Heffernan) get to Moves of the Diamond Hand, there’s a robust dice system but also tighter direction. When the game starts, you’re inside a train. Then you’re on the platform. Then you can access the lower floor of the train station. There’s no physical gatekeeping, but the game subtly leads you from one area and sequence to the next.
“It’s kind of like a street level in a Deus Ex game,” Heffernan says. “Practically speaking, from a design perspective, it benefits that the spaces are dense and tight. “The skills that I was learning early on were just like ‘how do you put assets and music into a 3D space and move in it?’ Eventually, I got to a point where that was happening so that I could really express myself in that way. Since then, I’ve learned more of the nuts and bolts of programming. More patterns. Tried-and-true methods for building a game. I’ve learned how to work the numbers a little more deliberately.
“I think I’m reaching for something, and I’ve been reaching for something, for a long time. It’s a bit futuristic. It’s a bit of cyberpunk. It’s a bit noir. Urban realness. Early ‘00s. But I don’t think I quite get there. I get there to a point, but I run out of time or patience – it’s good enough and I’ve got to get on. But I feel like that almost inability to reach this notion of what I’m after is the style – the attempt is the style. The style is me trying and not quite getting there, every time. But as long as I keep trying, I think the floor is rising.”
Moves of the Diamond Hand will launch in four parts. The first is completely free – the rest will follow throughout 2025. Stylistically, it’s perhaps the most vivid game that Heffernan has developed. Every part of it contains some vibrant, expressive flourish. But narratively and emotionally, Moves of the Diamond Hand is tied to reality.
“It’s about a few things,” Heffernan says. “One is belonging, and feeling like you’re a part of something that’s going to support you, and reaching for that. In the background there’s this mayoral election going on – it’s not a one-to-one thing, but it’s about elections in general. You’re trying to find a place in a community that’s going to support you while the world is getting topsy-turvy.
“It’s not directly referencing current events but it’s mindful of them, and they’re unconsciously seeping into what I’m doing. It’s asking players a question: what are they willing to do to get that feeling of community? Who do they want to support and who will support them back? While the world is crazy and players want a sense of something and a sense of place, they needn’t lose sight of their own selves and independence of thought, or independence of feeling. They still deserve to have that.
“I am an optimist,” Heffernan continues. “I’m an optimist in art. I believe in the power of the arts to shift people’s perspectives and move people. That power is very mysterious, and it’s not going anywhere. As long as that power is accessible and possible, then I remain an optimist. But I’m also a pragmatist and a realist, so there’s the inner conflict. There’s optimism but also questions.
“Ultimately, I just see myself as a person trained as an artist, trained as a musician, trained as a composer, who makes things and gets them done and tries to get them up to a standard, and I just keep on it because I like it, and I like it because I care.”
The first part of Moves of the Diamond Hand is out now and you can play it for free, right here. The rest of the game will be released throughout 2025.