Betrayal At Club Low | Gameplay Review (PC) | Game of the Year 2022 | Game Award 2022
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Betrayal At Club Low | Gameplay Review (PC)
What’s the best way to beat the queue and get into an exclusive club? You can interact with the people waiting alongside you and get them to push you to the front of the line, before convincing the bouncer you are needed inside. You can try to sneak by a dozing guard in a back alley. You can try to get onto a ladder.
But all these possibilities are guarded by the dice challenges and my character only has a few attempts before he exhausts his nerve or health. I plan to get past the sleepy guard by showing empathy but to do that I need a little extra cash to upgrade my wisdom rolls as well as a good set of dice from my pizza and from my self-aware condition.
Betrayal at Club Low is developed and published by Cosmo D Studios. I played the game on the PC using Steam. The title offers players a dice-driven adventure that goes to some weird places and encourages experimentation. The setup is quick and simple: the protagonist is an agent that has to infiltrate the titular club to extract a fellow operative who is in danger.
The task might seem simple, but his disguise is that of a pizza delivery man and that opens very few doors in the game’s universe. But in this world where a special talent for music can help shut down a laser-beam security door, players will have to try to get into the club, explore it and the characters inhabiting it, and try to find a way to extract Jay. There’s a lot of good writing in the game, filled with references and irony.
Mechanically, Betrayal at Club Low is all about dice, pizza, and skills. Want to reach into a dumpster to see whether you can pull out an interesting object? Wants to find out why the bartender is pouring out weak drinks? For these and all the other tasks that allow players to make progress, the game will introduce a dice battle. The protagonist’s values are determined by his skills and can be improved by spending hard-earned cash.
The opponents’ dice are fixed and, most of the time, feature pretty high figures, although they can be negatively affected by a variety of decisions and modifiers. The key to making progress is to tackle those challenges that feel within reach while finding ways to make money and gain positive modifiers (there are plenty of negative ones to deal with as well).
You can try any of the dice challenges as many times as you want, as long as you don’t run out of nerve or health, which leads to a game over. Always try to reach one of the better conditions before trying to deal with the toughest of challenges. And don’t attempt to upgrade all the skills at once, choose two that seem especially valuable and focus there.
Because the protagonist is a pizza delivery man and because there are plenty of ovens spread through the game, players will also use their pies to gain bonuses. There are ingredients to find and steal. A good pizza will generate rolls that add extra tips, compensate for damage dice, boost other rolls, and more. The entire dice system starts off simple and develops in weird and cool ways, with battles where there are more than 10 dies moving around, with re-rolls available to finesse results.
Betrayal at Club Low can be completed in under 3 hours while seeing the majority of its content. But there are enough options and challenging dice encounters that most players will want to run through it at least 2 times, not counting efforts that end in failure. This small world is a joy to discover and playing on the Joyride difficulty if the experience seems too hard is nothing to be ashamed of.
The Good:
Solid, replayable story
Dice-driven gameplay
Weird and cool interactions
The Bad:
A bit of a difficult start
Limited environments
Dice rolling can become repetitive
Conclusion:
Betrayal at Club Low might not the best-looking game and its gameplay might sometimes feel limited or unfair. But the game has plenty of weirdness, a clear goal, great moments, and the ability to get players to explore, take risks, and deal with failure. A small universe and well-defined mechanics make this one of the first titles I have played through three times (with another run planned) in quite some time.
The title could benefit from a decrease in the difficulty of the first sequence before gamers actually get into the club, but its other limitations are clear and well-communicated. I encourage players who like a good narrative and dice-focused gameplay to get past the limited graphics and potential initial failures to see as much as possible of what Betrayal at Club Low has to offer.
Review:
STORY = 9
GAMEPLAY = 8
CONCEPT = 10
GRAPHICS = 7
AUDIO = 9
MULTIPLAYER = 0
FINAL RATING = 8.5
Review: VERY GOOD
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