Steam Next Fest is consistently the best place to stumble across a new roguelike to devour your spare hours, and this year was no different. I tried Tears of Metal earlier, and although Half Sword doesn’t advertise itself as a roguelike, its demo certainly fits the mold. But the standout for me so far is Slots & Daggers — a discovery I made thanks to a slot-based roguelike I loved from a previous Next Fest.
That other game was CloverPit, which grafts a slot-machine mechanic onto the Balatro format and has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies. My fixation on CloverPit put Slots & Daggers on my radar — it’s a different take on the slot-machine roguelike, but it shares that same addictive, risk-and-reward core with a fantasy flair.
Slots & Daggers frames its action as if you’re sitting in a tavern, tinkering with a small arcade machine built into your table. You begin with three tokens — a sword, a shield, and a coin — and head out to do battle. Combat borrows the readable enemy-intent system from Slay the Spire: you can see what each foe plans to do on their turn, and every hit usually ramps up in threat as the fight progresses.
Upgrades are crucial. After each fight the game awards chips that can be spent to enhance the slot machine. In the demo most upgrades are incremental — small boosts to damage reduction or healing — but if you hoard chips you can buy a major upgrade that adds an extra reel. More reels mean higher-value outcomes, so I saved up to buy a fourth slot, then banked more to secure a fifth. I would have continued, but the demo cut off at that point.
Buying five slots let me obliterate most encounters, which meant I cleared the demo content faster than I expected. That truncated my time with the build tree and other upgrades, which was a little disappointing — but perhaps for the best. If Slots & Daggers hooks like Balatro or CloverPit do, I’ll be returning to it often enough to make up the time.
Check out our list of the best roguelike games.
Source: gamesradar.com
