A Dicebuilder That Rolls A 6 For Atmosphere And A 1 For Compulsion
If you were to stick a ‘Most Influential’ sticker on a 2024 release, you probably wouldn’t have picked Balatro. But you can see its grubby little fingerprints on so many indie games from the past couple of years. If you’re a popular parlour or party game, you can be sure that someone is coming at you with the words ‘roguelike deckbuilder’ on their breath.
If you just focus on dice or Yahtzee, there have already been plenty released recently. Dice A Million, Cats & Dice and Dice Dice Baby are all examples off the top of my head, and there are probably more. As a massive Dicey Dungeons fan, I’ll hold my tongue: it was here well before any of these games, even Balatro.
Yahtzee Via Texas Chainsaw Massacre
It’s a crowded field to waltz into, but BONEREADER has a plan. And that plan is similar to, but not identical, to that of games like Buckshot Roulette, Inscryption and Cloverpit. To stand out, it grins through rotted teeth and shakes its macabre bones. BONEREADER is as atmospheric as it is unsettling, and it gives the dice-rolling a texture that is very different from the games we mentioned in the second paragraph.
BONEREADER casts you as a character who is journeying from the electric chair to purgatory, where they await the next step in their unlife. But instead of feeling the bony grip of Death, you get confronted by a sequence of lost souls. They are trapped in various sheds, changing rooms and lighthouses, and you have to play them in a game of dice to progress. Between the rounds, you get to question them about their lives, their plans, and what this realm is.
This theme is more prominent than I expected, as you get to work through dialogue choices and decide whether to bring these stragglers with you as you attempt to escape. The writing is good and the characters better. There’s a real rogue’s gallery here, as you find spirits that look like children, viruses and mangled cowboys. Each has a strong personality and a wayward perspective on death.
Characters That You Might Meet On A Late Bus From Swindon
You get to play each character four times, and they all come with their personalised ‘house rule’: a passive effect that disrupts your playing style. One limits you to one card per game, another flips your cards over so you can’t see them, and the worst turns off rerolls completely. They each increase the point threshold, too.
If you’ve played Yahtzee before, or similar trick-taking or poker dice games, then you will be at home. You get to roll five dice and ‘hold’ the ones you like best. Then you roll two more times, holding two more times, before you settle on the hand you want to make. You might be aiming for a ‘run’ of increasing numbers (similar to a straight), or three-, four- or five-of-a-kind.
BONEREADER’s riff on this formula is to hand you some cards. Those cards have a sequence printed on them (the runs and -of-a-kinds that we mentioned earlier), and you need to match the dice to one of these cards. Point-scores helpfully tally up on the cards, showing you what you could win if you submit your current dice for scoring. You get four ‘tries’ to score, which effectively means four cards and their associated dice. Like the number of rerolls, these can be increased over the course of the game.
Hit the lost-soul’s threshold, and you’re whizzed to the BONEREADER shop. It’s a snug blanket for anyone who has played a roguelike deckbuilder recently. You can buy new cards, new dice and relics, and the last of these are not too dissimilar from a joker. There’s only one slot for them, however, and they tend to have activated, one-time abilities rather than passive, persistent benefits. You trigger them when you want them most, and watch them disappear, leaving you with additional multipliers, extra tries and reduced points thresholds to hit.
Casino In The Sense That I Lose More Than I Win
I’ve mostly described the game’s campaign mode (and we do mean campaign – more on that in a bit), as you move through souls sequentially. But there’s also a Casino Mode, oddly named as there’s not much casino to be found. Instead of growing a single deck over multiple battles, you choose one of several decks and play a small number of games with it. It’s slightly more bitesize and quickfire. But not that much more.
I gesture vaguely at everything I’ve described and think ‘that’s a game I want to play’. I’m obsessed with this type of game; I’m a sucker for the Buckshot aesthetic; and the Balatro structure is derivative but works. There’s a reason so many games are leaning on it.
Yet, I’m cold on BONEREADER, and that’s mostly down to some very strange design decisions that I can’t quite figure out. They don’t make sense to me, and they keep chipping away at my enjoyment like an icepick.
We’ve erroneously used the term ‘roguelike’ several times in the review, because BONEREADER isn’t actually a roguelike. If you lose, you don’t get whisked back to the start: you retry at the last save point, returning to the latest lost soul as if the previous game was never played. Bonereader, at least in this game mode, wants you to persist, bludgeoning your way through each challenge so that you can see what the next soul and house rule turns out to be.
It’s Hard To Know Whether To Stick Or Twist
But this creates some real mixed messages. ’Deckbuilder’ and ‘roguelike’ go together like cheese and bacon because you can make a capital-T Terrible deck, crash and burn, and not worry about it. You can make an overpowered deck, win, get a pat on the back, and then have to start all over again. But that can’t happen here. If you have a bad deck, you are lumbered with it. If you have a great deck, you breeze through. Rarely is it one or the other.
I had a very mediocre deck that was aiming to pump out 4s and 6s and capitalise with cards that rewarded high or even rolls. It stuttered along, barely doing well enough to survive. But I was midway through the campaign before I realised this. To change the dice and deck was almost impossible: I didn’t have enough money, and the shop was stingy with its benefits. So I died and replayed, died and replayed, hoping to get the Zippo relic that would reduce the point threshold and luck my way towards progress. Most of the time I did; other times I would be stuck on a match-up for ten, fifteen replays.
You could play BONEREADER as a roguelike, restarting if you have a naff deck, but there are no unlocks to make the next run easier/better. You have to work through all of the same battles that you completed before, hoping that your new tactic is a winner.
Casino Mode should have been the saving grace, the mode for a more – dare we say it – Balatro-like experience. But it, too, is campaign flavoured. If you lose, you replay that same match until you win. It’s still relatively long. There are still no unlocks, no persistent meta-rewards that you can point to and say ‘this will help me next time’.
A Game Where Early Access Might Have Done Wonders
I also have a long, long list of things that irk me about BONEREADER. Some of them are big, some seemingly minor. Why is there only one relic slot, and why are they generally pitiful? Why am I limited to 12 cards, and have to manually destroy them if I want to collect a new one, while I can have as many dice as I like? Why do the dice roll onto each other, or behind the UI so that I have trouble reading them? Why are some dice completely unintelligible, and why are ALL of the cards impossible to read without hovering over them? Why, if I make a change to my deck and then lose, do I have to make that change all over again?
I enjoyed BONEREADER enough to stumble my way to the Judge at the end of the campaign. It took me eight hours of desperately improving my shoddy deck, but I did it. But once I got there, and saw that Casino Mode was roughly more of the same – albeit I did complete a couple of runs with new decks – I retired BONEREADER to the archive of my Steam library. It’s not that I disliked the experience: I just had no desire whatsoever to play it again.
Now imagine saying that about any other deckbuilder: ‘play it once and you’re done with it’. It’s not a good sign. I can’t fathom why the designers have taken the path that they have. This has all the trappings and mechanics of a roguelike deckbuilder, but it’s welded to a campaign structure. And the cut-and-shutting leads to a game that lacks, rather than benefits, from that approach. There is no desire to replay, no feeling of momentum, no sense of imbalance, and all of these feel like they are core to the genre.
For all the grumbles I often have about roguelikes, and how they’re ubiquitous, I can’t help thinking that BONEREADER was the one game that should have embraced it. What’s one more on the pile? It would have made an average game into an exciting one.
Important Links
Buy from Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/4240080/BONEREADER/
