The next surreal dice-rolling RPG from Cosmo D is a terrific follow-up to Betrayal at Club Low

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Moves of the Diamond Hand's first chapter is out now for free.

A puppet with a large, robotic crocodile head lies on a chair next to a curved piano in Moves of the Diamond Hand.

Rejoice, dear readers, for today heralds the arrival of a new Cosmo D game. Technically, it's episode 1 of a new Cosmo D game, as this latest project - Moves of the Diamond Hand - will be split into four separate chapters, and released in currently unknown intervals at a later date. Today marks the release of Chapter 1 in its entirety - as a free demo - and when Chapter 2 eventually arrives, it will shift into paid early access.

But enough logistics chat. Onto the game. If you've been following Cosmo D's work since his Off-Peak and The Norwood Suite days, you'll know that each game in the loosely-connected Off Peak City-verse is usually quite different from the last. All of them share the same off-kilter tone and love of strange, undulating architecture and NPCs with haunting, dead-eyed stares, but how you navigate and interact with these pockets of dreamy, urban nightlife changes from one game to the next. Moves of the Diamond Hand, however, is almost a direct continuation of the dice-rolling skill checks from 2022's Betrayal at Club Low, albeit with some added twists to game your dice even further.

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You begin on a subway train with dreams of joining the mysterious Circus X, and a surprise encounter with an old friend slowly reintroduces the game's crop of core skills. Like Betrayal at Club Low, they're the important things in life: cooking, deception, music, observation, physique, wisdom and wit. All of them take the form of six-sided dice, and the more experience you gain from completing (or failing) certain tasks, the more you can pump those points into raising the numbers on those dice to give you a better chance of succeeding in later situations. As before, your opponents also have dice of their own you'll need to contend with, and they'll change depending on which course of action you decide to take.

A colourful train station with tree branches, broken glass and large animal head statues at either end in Moves of the Diamond Hand. A large cityscape at night rises up in the background, against a red orange sky.

But before you're able to reach and infiltrate this circus that may not be a circus, you need to find a way out of both the train, and the station where you end up. This is what Chapter 1 consists of, and I had a very jolly two hours noodling around its platforms and secret tunnels, and rooting through bins and strangers' pockets to find cash, items, keys and more to further my escape. The station's in lockdown when you arrive, you see, as the Jade Bass AI companion for a certain mayor candidate has gone missing, and the detective in charge of coming to find it and question suspects is running late.

It leaves a handy vacuum for you to step into and sort out while everyone else mills around being a bit useless and shifty-looking. You'll need to enquire, cajole and sometimes forcibly get folks to open up to you via the aforementioned dice-rolls, but thanks to its fun and entertaining script, there's lots of choice in how you go about it - you could tell a joke to win them over with your wit, for example, or bluff your way to victory using your deception. Others, meanwhile, are more susceptible to being impressed by your culinary experience, as once again, pizza and the art of making them sits at the heart of many a great social interaction in this game.

A man in a high vis jacket and construction helmet holds an apple while saying 'Impressive, Katharine' in Moves of the Diamond Hand.

A woman in a blue jacket covered in piano keys asks the player if they've come to make a pizza in their pizza oven in Moves of the Diamond Hand.

Indeed, like Betrayal at Club Low, you can make pizzas using various ingredients to help juice your dice rolls and give you an edge in certain conversations, and one character won't even give you the time of day unless you've got a pizza equipped in your inventory. Pizzas aren't the only form of equipable sustenance in Moves of the Diamond Hand, however. This time, you can also use a vending machine to buy gum, drinks and other foodstuffs, all of which have various, one-time effects that come into play during dice encounters if you decide to equip them. Some, for example, can restore your energy and nerve - which if they hit zero is game over for you - making it a touch easier to stay on your feet this time compared to the spirals of failure you could sometimes get into after a bad run in Club Low. Others give you extra numbered dice to play with, as do certain disguises you can find in various green tubs throughout the station.

Three large pigeons loom over the player on a station platform in Moves of the Diamond Hand.

Three large pigeons loom over the player as they decide whether to commit to a dice roll in Moves of the Diamond Hand.

The disguises are perhaps a little overpowered for this early stretch for the game, though I did like how each successful dice roll from it gradually degraded the overall effectiveness of the disguise over time. If my cheap blue suit jacket gave me a +2 in one encounter, for example, next time that side would only give me a +1, and so on. By the time I finished the chapter, some of my disguises almost become more of a hindrance than a help, though they can be repaired for a fee later in the game.

As I reached the final stretch of the opening chapter, I really didn't want it to end - and the tantalising glimpse you're afforded of the city beyond the train station once you're allowed to leave just makes me even more excited for the launch of Chapter 2. To borrow a pizza analogy from the game, if Betrayal at Club Low was a tasty classic pepperoni, then Moves of the Diamond Hand feels like more of a meat feast, its additional systems piled on top of its core dice rolls to make everything feel a bit more fun and fulfilling.

The player prepares to pickpocket two strangers standing near a busking site in Moves of the Diamond Hand.

A pigeon guard faces the player with a green light on his head, while the player hides behind a bench full of large mushrooms, in Moves of the Diamond Hand.

It's perhaps a little easier and more of a crowd-pleaser than Club Low - at least based on this early slice - but I'm intrigued to see how each subsequent chapter will grow and evolve its dice rolls as time goes on. This is a much larger and more ambitious game than anything Cosmo D's made before, and I hope that later chapters can maintain that sense of balance and progression that's often so taut and tightly constructed in his previous microcosms. Only time will tell on that front, but for now, who could possibly say no to another free, two-hour jaunt inside another weird and whimsical pocket of Off Peak City? Get it down your gullet and enjoy.