There’s a fine line between a game with a lot going on and one with way too much going on. Especially in saturated genres like turn-based tactical RPGs, the desire to make a game stand out with unique features can easily spill over to make it a bloated mess with too many systems to keep track of. One of the best new demos at Steam Next Fest walks that line brilliantly, layering surprising mechanics one on top of the other without ever feeling overstuffed.
This Next Fest isn’t the first time Dice Gambit has gotten a demo, but a recent update makes it feel brand-new just the same. The demo is set in the demon-infested city of Neo-Talis, with players taking on the role of the new inquisitor, an inherited position that bonds your family line to the defense of the city by purging the demons known as the chromatic. That premise might conjure images of a grimdark tactics game, but Dice Gambit is anything but. It’s colorful, funny, and chaotic, with a fantastic battle system and a heap of clever management mechanics to back it up.
When you start a mission, you advance across a map toward the boss, hitting battles and other events along the way. In addition to straightforward fights, some levels push you to slay more enemies before a battle-crazed opponent does, or guard a robot while it makes important deliveries (of ice cream) in the face of invading demons.
At the start of every round in combat, each of your characters rolls a set of dice which dictate their actions. Depending on which face the dice land on, you can use them to move, attack, defend, or execute a special attack unique to each character. It’s easy to grasp and almost always leaves you with several ways to plan your turn without overwhelming you with options.
The game’s complexity comes from special dice and combos. One face of each die is a wild card, letting you perform any action, while also filling a meter that strengthens enemies for the rest of the mission for every four of these dice you use. The tradeoff is clear and tangible, and deciding when to gain an immediate advantage for a tougher challenge later adds a wonderful extra layer of strategy. As you gain levels, you’ll also learn new skills that use two dice for special effects, like pulling enemies toward you while damaging them or throwing a handful of knives in all directions.
Characters gain passive traits as they level up as well, which often grant a benefit in exchange for some drawback, like losing health every turn. Character progression also seems influenced by various Fire Emblem games, with some twists that make building your family of inquisitors one of the most compelling parts of the demo. Early on, you’re asked to choose a spouse from a few potential candidates with different attributes to begin your political dynasty. Before long, you start having children (via cloning rather than the old-fashioned way), all of whom become units you can bring into future battles. While every new recruit has some natural skills, you need to send them to school to learn abilities from specialized classes, with a heavy emphasis on mixing and matching to create exactly the custom class you want for each one.
It is, as you’re probably seeing, a lot to handle, and on top of all that there’s also a relationship system that unlocks new features for getting close to NPCs, and the need to track units’ stamina and health across missions so they don’t get killed or burned out, and probably a handful of mechanics I haven’t even seen yet. But at least in the demo, it never feels like too much. Each time a new system was revealed, it only made the game more enticing. Nothing here feels superfluous, with every new addition feeding back into the excellent battle system and madcap story in an utterly satisfying way. Dice Gambit is expected to launch later this year, and a few hours with its demo has already made it one of my most anticipated games of 2025.
