I’m at a weird place with Moves of the Diamond Hand, which released in early access on April 13: It’s a phenomenal RPG, nothing else out there looks like it, and it already has a greater volume of sheer stuff than the entirety of its creator’s previous work put together.
Unfortunately, I really hate playing singleplayer games in early access—PCG staff writer Morgan Park hit the nail on the head when he tried out New Blood’s early access immersive sim opus, Gloomwood, four years ago: It’s too good to play unfinished.
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But when I decided I was done and set Moves of the Diamond Hand aside to play something else, I immediately missed its presence in my life: What do?
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If you like adventure games or walk ‘n talk RPGs like Disco Elysium and are less bothered about running into a “pardon our mess” WIP sign than I am, Diamond Hand is a no-brainer recommendation.
Diamond Dawgz
Creator Cosmo D makes RPGs with the sensibility of a 2002 Adult Swim show you caught at a friend’s place at 3AM and never learned the name of. It’s Xavier Renegade Angel with more plot and more heart. I sang a sea shanty to a clone politician’s emotional support fish (also cloned) to make it trust me, then went to stump for his airhead hippy jock rival on the campaign trail. “Cooking” might be the most OP skill.
I love this game.
Cosmo D’s games share the setting of Off-Peak City, a surreal noir metropolis where blue-skinned DJs, cloned jazz saxophonists, and animal-man chimeras coexist under the auspices of various secret societies and at least one evil megacorp. The dev’s initial games were straight first-person adventures, but 2022’s Betrayal at Club Low brought in dice rolls, skills, and a freeform sensibility that made it feel like a madcap tabletop one-shot.
Club Low was a dense single environment where you could explore, meet people, and solve problems with a number of non-combat skills. Its biggest difference from the likes of Disco Elysium, aside from style, was its emphasis on the act of dice rolling itself: Diamond Hand and Club Low have this incredibly satisfying screen where you see your skill checks play out with physics-simulated dice.
Diamond and Low also embrace that tactility with how you build your character: You level up individual faces of your skill dice and pick up permanent or limited-use augment dice to add to your rolls. Both games kinda feel like deckbuilders, but for dice, in how much they lean into simulating the toy.
Story-wise in Diamond Hand, the economy’s in the shitter and you’ve run away to join the circus—Circus X, to be specific, which seems closer to an experimental art collective and political organization than Barnum & Bailey. If impressing and joining Circus X is your Dovahkiin personal main quest, Off-Peak City’s mayoral race is the closely intertwined Stormcloak civil war subplot.
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This city where clones can’t vote is on the verge of electing its first clone mayor, a copy of a beloved politician from 100 years ago. His opponents are a self-help hustle grindset prosecutor and a slacker gourmand/rock climber—you can choose to support any of them in an open-ended election sidequest/minigame.
There is a quest tied to each skill—cooking, deception, music, observation, physique, wisdom, and wit—to impress Circus X and be invited to join. For music, you can play politics at the jazz club, “Floating Frequencies,” and muscle your way onto the house band, while cooking puts you on the path to make the perfect sandwich.
It’s all set in a real nice mini open world, a dense urban environment reminiscent of a Deus Ex hub or Disco Elysium’s Martinaise. Each major location on the map is a puzzle box of skill check challenges and interconnected sidequests rivaling the entirety of Betrayal at Club Low in size and complexity. And aside from scale, Diamond Hand has two big mechanical innovations on offer.
The first is a light stealth system, the sort that usually drives me up a wall, but more or less works for me in Diamond Hand. You’ll find little restricted areas with mandatory objectives, optional goodies, and some kind of creature—lobsterman, eyeball lion, bird boy, classic private security—patrolling around, plus hiding spots that give a negative debuff on your next roll.
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If you get caught by a guard, you can always make a difficult roll to be sent on your way with no further consequences. Despite being a cooking and music-obsessed wimp, I was able to finagle a physique check against the aforementioned lobsterman that put the fear of Neptune into him—he’d sheepishly and politely ask me to leave whenever he found me from there on out, with none of the usual health damage or skill debuffs he’d usually smack me with.
It adds a little tension to the exploration, but I never found it frustrating. Diamond Hand is very good about handling failure in general: I never felt the urge to save scum, as most rolls can be attempted as many times as you want. The price of failure is typically some type of debuff die added to your next roll: Fail a deception check to pickpocket someone, for example, and you’ll get an “ashamed” die that will lower your next roll or make it do psychic damage to you.
When to fold ’em
In Cosmo D’s other big gameplay experiment it dips into roguelike territory, with a series of rolls you have to perform in sequence and escalating challenges and rewards. They play out when you’re busking for tips at a nightclub, or debating on behalf of your candidate of choice in the election.
Both add a bit more heat and stakes than the standard rolls, and the musical challenge especially has a resource management element I really love: You have to cycle through all the skills to impress the crowd before you can reuse old material, meaning you have to strategically deploy your weak skills when you have the right augment dice to win out anyway, or the space to sacrifice a failed roll without losing the run.
My one big critique of Diamond Hand—aside from how its unfinished state impacts the pacing—is that I’d like to see more curveball design like this in the final game, as opposed to just straight one-off skill checks.
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The open-ended structure—something that will lend itself well to the full game—made my early accessphobia more acute. In its current form, I’d wander off in an interesting direction or tug on a story thread, only to find that it petered out or cut off abruptly in a “this part isn’t done yet” message. One sidequest that involved serving drinks at a nightclub ended in a progress-blocking hard lock whenever I tried to finish it.
Contrast that with Diamond Hand’s demo, the first chapter of the game: It’s totally self-contained, with a clear ending and no loose ends within the playable area. I found that made for a more satisfying slice, despite being more limited than what I can play now. It’s a thorny thing, because early access is clearly a boon for developers, getting cashflow and feedback flowing while still working on a project, but I’ve never loved the experience as a player.
I enjoyed my further exposure to Off-Peak City, though, and I keep thinking about Diamond Hand. I’ve been bumping the lone ambient track anyone’s uploaded to YouTube while working, and the main menu theme is an absolute all-time banger. I need Cosmo D to put it on Bandcamp yesterday.
Early access has further entrenched my takeaway from the demo: This will be a fantastic RPG when it’s done, a cult classic in the making. Cosmo D currently estimates 1.0 to be ready by spring of next year.
Moves of the Diamond Hand is on sale on Steam for $17 from a standard $20, and that’s an investment I’d be comfortable making even at this stage. But unless you’re already among the Cosmo D faithful, I’d recommend waiting to play Diamond Hand and checking out Betrayal at Club Low first—it still boggles my mind that it has only 500 Steam reviews.
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