“A retro mini-roguelike inside a slot machine. Steady your blade – and spin!” – Steam Description

Slots & Daggers is a slot machine roguelite. I’ve been playing a lot of Gambling with your Friends and in that game I SWEAR by the slot machine. The slot machine can do no wrong, all hail the Slot Machine Gods! Well, that’s what I thought. I played Friedermann‘s Slots & Daggers, I have never been so betrayed by the slots.

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The Loop

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You start out the game in the first area, The Plains, with just a sword, a coin, and a shield. You press the SPIN button to spin your 3 available wheels. You press SPIN! again to stop each wheel when you want to. Sword deals damage, shield gives you a physical damage buffer… a shield, and coin gives you money to be used in the shop. You repeat this cycle of seeing a boss, spinning aggressively until one of you is dead, and progressing to the next boss if that one isn’t you.

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Build-A-Build

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After each boss kill, you can spend your coins that you got during that fight. You DID get coins, right? If you take each creature down fast enough, you even get a bonus of coins! But now’s the chance you get to spend your coins on upgrading your existing symbols, buying new symbols, or buying power-ups. Some symbols let you re-roll the wheel, some can do more damage but require a skillcheck mini-game to complete. Power-ups fall into two categories, passives and actives. You can use an active power-up after your attack but before the enemy attacks as long as you have the coin to spend to activate it.

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Pushing Beyond

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When you inevitably get that game over because you just get out paced by the enemies, you get tokens based on your score for your run. You can use those tokens to buy modifiers that slot right into your machine. I’m not going to tell you how to spend your tokens but I will tell you getting 2 additional wheels is going to be leaps and bounds ahead of any other upgrade, so save for that. You can refund your tokens completely, and for free at any time outside of a run, so feel free to tinker.

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• Graphics– The pixel art is a little horror but extremely well done. It IS pixel art so if that’s your jam, like it is mine, you’re gonna like it.
• Gameplay– Slots & Daggers is frustrating until it’s not. You’re really at the mercy of the RNG lords until you can influence enough to push past whatever stands in your way.
• Sound– Sound design was satisfying. The slots are slotting, the hits sound impactful.
• Controls– There’s only 1 button you need for a slot machine. But there are the other buttons like power-ups that are very clearly labeled on your screen, it’s a good presentation.
• Story– The story is pretty bare bones, you have a couple dialogue options between areas to explore, but I don’t think a slot machine rogue-like needs much in the way of story, spin baby, spin.