Moves Of The Diamond Hand might be one of the whackiest indie games I have had the pleasure of stumbling across during our weekly indie game night. The game is described as a first-person urban RPG, powered by dice and intrigue, and I was certainly intrigued.
Opening the game up, you’re greeted by a bizarre main menu with a bird man and an acid trip of an art style. That does look very odd next to the very plain design of buttons and the odd choice of font, but don’t let that put you off as there is something really enjoyable behind all this. Click start and you’re able to select a difficulty and a colour. There’s even custom difficulty settings which is a nice touch. For my run I just went with the standard difficulty, and after a bit of a long loading screen we were in.
The game starts you off on a train already at the station with one man on the train called Luke. He was apparently your music teacher at one point in time and he goes ahead and introduces you to the character sheet and gives you points to spend on the various skills. These skills are what you will be using for a lot of the interactions in the world. An example of this is when you finally step off the train and step into bubble tea that had been dumped out in front of it, and you have to select a skill to check to avoid or embrace the fall into it. Then you roll against the odds.
Every time you fail or succeed you’ll earn more points to spend based on your rolls, and the more points you stack into one skill the more advantages you’ll get from it. The only danger you really have is the chance of losing one of the two stats, health or nerve. If you lose all of these it’s game over and you have to reload. Luckily there are a variety of items and different disguises that you can pick up to modify your rolls and even gain back health or nerve.
As silly as the game seems it’s surprising in depth and sucked me in really quick, not only mechanically but in how interesting the world is, from slipping on bubble tea to stealing a key from a failed clone experiment bird man to trying to solve the mystery of a missing bass. Right now the demo seems to be showing off the first full chapter of the game, and with early access the 2nd chapter has become available, so if a 1stp person adventure through an acid trip of a world with the depth of a traditional tabletop sounds like your jam, I would highly recommend checking it out.
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