“Unveiling the Next Surreal Adventure: Cosmo D’s Exciting Follow-Up to Betrayal at Club Low”
By The initial chapter of Moves of the Diamond Hand is now available for free.
It’s a great moment, beloved readers, as today marks the release of a new game from Cosmo D. Technically, it’s the first episode of a new Cosmo D game, with this latest installment – Moves of the Diamond Hand – scheduled to be divided into four distinct chapters, released at presently unspecified intervals in the future. Today signifies the launch of Chapter 1 in its entirety – as a complimentary demo – and once Chapter 2 ultimately arrives, it could transition into paid early access.
But enough with the logistics talk. Let’s dive into the game. If you have been following Cosmo D’s creations since his Off-High and The Norwood Suite days, you’ll know that each game in the loosely-connected Off High City universe tends to be notably different from the others. They all share a similar offbeat tone and feature peculiar, fluctuating designs along with NPCs who possess eerie, hollow-eyed gazes. However, the ways in which you navigate and interact with these intriguing, urban nightlife scenes vary from one game to the next. Moves of the Diamond Hand, however, serves as a direct continuation of the dice-rolling skill tests from 2022’s Betrayal at Club Low, albeit with some additional twists to enhance your gameplay.
You begin your journey in a subway station, dreaming of joining the enigmatic Circus X. A surprising encounter with an old ally gradually reintroduces the game’s core skills. Like in Betrayal at Club Low, these skills encompass essential elements of life: cooking, deception, music, commentary, physicality, information, and wit. Each skill utilizes six-sided dice, and the more skills you develop from completing (or failing) specific tasks, the more you can enhance those dice’s values to increase your chances of success in future situations. As before, your rivals also have their respective dice that you need to contend with, and they will shift dynamically based on the actions you choose to undertake.
However, before you can successfully infiltrate this circus that may not even be a circus, it’s crucial to find a way out of both the subway and the station where you find yourself. Here’s what Chapter 1 entails, and I thoroughly enjoyed two hours exploring its platforms and hidden tunnels, rummaging through containers and the pockets of strangers to gather money, items, keys, and more to aid my escape. The station is in lockdown, as you’ll soon observe, because the AI companion of a particular mayoral candidate has gone missing, and the detective tasked with locating it and questioning suspects is lagging behind.
This situation creates a convenient gap for you to exploit while everyone else remains somewhat useless and suspicious. You may need to investigate, persuade, and sometimes compel individuals to open up to you through the aforementioned dice rolls. However, because of its engaging and humorous script, there is a lot of flexibility in how you approach it – for instance, you can tell a witty story to charm them, or use your deception skills to maneuver your way to victory. Others, meanwhile, may be more impressed by your culinary talents, as the making of pizza often plays a central role in many social interactions within this game.
The disguises might be slightly overpowered for this early phase of the game, although I appreciated how each successful dice roll subtly diminished the overall effectiveness of the disguise over time. For example, if my inexpensive blue blazer provided a +2 in one encounter, the next time that disguise would only yield a +1, and so forth. By the time I completed the chapter, some of my disguises became more of an obstacle than a benefit, though they can be repaired for a fee later in the game.
As I approached the concluding segment of the introductory chapter, I truly didn’t want it to end – and the enticing view of the city beyond the train station, whenever you’re permitted to exit, intensifies my excitement for the launch of Chapter 2. To use a pizza metaphor from the game, if Betrayal at Club Low was a delicious classic pepperoni, then Moves of the Diamond Hand feels more like a meat feast, with additional features layered on top of the fundamental dice rolls to create a more enjoyable and rewarding experience.
It might be slightly simpler and more of a crowd-pleaser than Club Low – at least based on this initial segment – but I’m curious to see how each upcoming chapter will advance and transform its dice rolls over time. This is a significantly larger and more ambitious project than anything Cosmo D has created previously, and I hope that subsequent chapters can maintain that sense of balance and progression that has often been so tight and well-structured in his earlier creations. Only time will reveal how that will play out, but