Steam Next Fest consistently serves as an excellent venue for discovering new roguelikes to occupy your leisure hours, and this event is no exception. Recently, I explored Tears of Metal, and although Half Sword might not market itself as fitting into this genre, its demo certainly does. However, the standout title for me so far is Slots & Daggers—a game I stumbled upon thanks to another roguelike I became fond of during the last Next Fest. The game in question was CloverPit, which takes a slot machine approach within the Balatro format and has impressively sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its launch. My fascination with that led me to Slots & Daggers, which, while distinctively different, still falls into the realm of slot machine roguelikes with its unique fantasy vibe.
In Slots & Daggers, you feel as if you’re seated in a pub, fiddling with a basic arcade machine embedded in your table. At the game’s outset, you receive three tokens—a sword, a shield, and a coin—and then embark on battles against monsters. The combat draws inspiration from Slay the Spire, where you have complete awareness of the actions your enemies will take during their turn, with each strike likely to inflict progressively greater damage.
After dodging Silksong, this Balatro-inspired slot machine roguelike exceeded even my highest expectations, achieving the remarkable milestone of 100,000 copies sold in just one day.
While the strategic depth in Slay the Spire comes from selecting the right card from your deck, Slots & Daggers removes that aspect. Instead, you input your selected tokens into the slot machine, and the outcomes dictated by luck determine your actions for that round. You might end up with three swords, inflicting massive crit damage and vanquishing your foe; however, you could just as easily pull two coins and a shield, leading to a harsh defeat.
You can sway the odds in your favor via new tiles and both passive and active effects that activate between rounds. I found myself building around a duo of ‘skillcheck’ weapons—a broadsword and a mace—which based their damage on how well I performed in a minigame. I often chose healing passives, accumulating lifesteal and active healing spells to sustain my health. On one particular run, I opted to fight my enemies with my wallet, continually opting for money-driven upgrades, allowing me to buy nearly everything in the shop by the time I faced the demo’s final boss.
Crafting your own fortune becomes essential in this gameplay. While you might not draw the necessary tokens and find yourself facing game over, death typically follows from insufficient gear when pitted against certain adversaries. The retro aesthetic of Slots & Daggers and its tabletop-style exploration provides a unique twist; losing feels more forgiving than it does in Slay the Spire. There’s an inherent distance since you’re playing a game within a game, and the randomness means that while loss often appears beyond your control, you must accept that it’s part of the experience.
Making my luck was crucial to progressing. After each battle, you collect chips that can be used to enhance your machine. In the demo, these upgrades are relatively minor, offering slight boosts to damage absorption and healing. However, if you save diligently, you can accumulate enough chips to invest in larger upgrades, unlocking additional slots. More slots translate to better outcomes, so I saved all my chips, expanded to a fourth slot, then did so again for a fifth. I would have pursued even more, but the demo eventually limited my progress.
Ultimately, this limitation turned out to be beneficial, as five slots allowed me to inflict such significant damage on my foes that I quickly discovered I had exhausted all the content the demo offered. This also meant that there was little incentive to invest in other upgrades, causing my gameplay time with Slots & Daggers to end sooner than I had anticipated. While somewhat disappointing, it may be fortuitous; I suspect this game will demand as much of my time as Balatro and CloverPit have, ensuring I won’t be done with it anytime soon.
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