My new most anticipated RPG let me be a kleptomaniac gourmand set loose in a noir city on a quest to make 'the perfect sandwich'

When I first fired up the demo for Moves of the Diamond Hand, I rolled a character specializing in "Observation" and "Wit," two skills I figured had to be good for the sort of talky, investigative RPG I'd clocked this as.

"Cooking" had to be something like Deus Ex's swimming skill⁠—surely speccing into that would bite me in the ass. But literally the second challenge I ran into had a cooking option to bypass it, and what's more, the way of the chef might even be "OP" as far as this adventure game-RPG hybrid goes. It was time to re-roll.

Moves of the Diamond Hand is the next game from Cosmo D, an independent developer and musician whose most well-known work so far was 2022's Betrayal at Club Low.

Club Low has been one of those real head, hardcore, indie-liker indies I've been meaning to make time for, but Diamond Hand's demo earned it an immediate Spring Sale purchase and Steam Deck install. Cosmo D is cooking.

It's a combat-free RPG where the gameplay is all exploration, dialogue, and skill checks⁠—think Disco Elysium, Planescape Torment, or the non-combat bits of New Vegas and Baldur's Gate 3.

Diamond Hand's first person perspective and punk, urban nightlife grounding also really reminded me of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, one of my major RPG fixations.

Character leveling, gear, consumables, and even side quest results are all about modifying your d6 skill rolls. You want to specialize, but not too much (I invested in two "main" and two "backup" skills), with most obstacles able to be overcome by multiple skills, but rarely all of them.

Meanwhile, successes elsewhere can often "soften" a skill check, letting you complete a quest to sidestep a challenging roll, or use one of your strengths to squeak out a successful roll with a weaker ability.

For example, my gourmet proclivities let me impress multiple NPCs with my knowledge of their beverage of choice, earning me special bonuses on subsequent rolls with "Wisdom" or "Physique," which I was deficient in.

The result is an experience where I'm curious to try it with a different build, but didn't feel like it fully locked me out of quests or choices. There's replay value, but I didn't feel shortchanged or like "oh, this is the Physique part⁠—not for my build."

That may change (but in a good way) in the full game though: Early dialogue implies there's an exclusive path as part of the main quest for each individual skill, almost like a class-exclusive quest in another RPG⁠—think the Thieves' Guild in the OG Baldur's Gate or the Elder Scrolls' various class-flavored guilds. As a cooking specialist, my stated goal was to create the perfect sandwich.

Pizza pizza

In the meantime, cooking opens up an entire pizza-crafting minigame where toppings you find in the garbage can be baked into dice roll-enhancing pies. Basil provided my favorite effect, swapping my dice roll with the opposing one, opening up Uno reverso moments where I'd deliberately sandbag a difficult roll with one of my weak skills, then swap my crappy result for the opposing good one like a little trickster imp.

I can't speak to the taste of an "oops, all basil" pizza, but it's mechanically unimpeachable. Further, many NPCs in the demo can be pickpocketed via the Deception skill, and I'll be curious to see if the other skills get similar bonus mechanics to the pickpocketing and pizza chef minigames.

Something I really have to praise, though, is that I never wanted to save scum while playing this demo⁠—the myriad mitigation tools, ability to re-try most rolls, and occasional interesting results from failure all made living with it preferable to obsessively reloading—I can't even say that about Disco Elysium or Baldur's Gate 3, two of my very favorite videogames.

The culmination of all this standout RPG gameplay was not the final dialogue boss fight with an AI-enhanced Big Mouth Billy Bass⁠—though that was a great moment. No, he was the Sephiroth to another dialogue challenge's Emerald Weapon.

The Ultimate

You can fill in for a noted street performer in front of her adoring public, which results in a sort of mini roguelike, repeatable dialogue puzzle-type thing. You have to pass progressively harder skill checks to perform for the crowd and reach the end of the sequence, and can draw on your entire body of skills⁠—not just the explicit "Music" one⁠—to do so. Three failed checks causes you to go bust and forfeit all the tip money you've accrued.

The thing is, you can only use each skill once until you exhaust the full repertoire, which unlocks them all again, meaning you have to strategically deploy your weak skills and consumables, or even deliberately go bust on a few checks (which also lowers the difficulty modifiers), to go the distance and complete the performance. You can also, of course, cut and run with your winnings to buy better stuff and gear up for an ultimate run.

There's a sublime, Balatro-like loop to Diamond Hand's skill checks. Buried under its immersive, adventure-oriented exterior is a devilishly good, mechanically inspired RPG, one that sets Diamond Hand apart from the wealth of stylish, gorgeous adventure games on Steam.

But Diamond Hand is also a singularly stylish, gorgeous game. Cosmo D's Off-Peak City, the unifying setting of these games, has a kind of "Adult Swim noir" vibe to it: Very brash, surreal, anarchic, and punk. Crucially, though, it also has a very warm, empathic current running under everything. It's not so absurd that I felt disconnected from the story, and there's a real commitment to Off-Peak's fictional rules and politics that made me want to know more about the world.

So I of course grabbed Club Low for like, six bucks, and loaded it on my Steam Deck. Despite currently lacking a verified or even "playable" status, it apparently runs quite nicely on Valve's handheld.

The Diamond Hand demo is at a weirder spot at the moment. I tried it on Deck just to see, and while it runs well, it currently seems confused by the Steam Deck's inputs, recognizing some of the handheld's buttons as part of a gamepad, and others as mouse and keyboard.

It's hardly a dealbreaker or anything, but Diamond Hand on Deck requires either more serious user-end tuning than I was able to commit to during my work day, or attention from Cosmo D. In the meantime, this is a desktop affair.

But I'm on board no matter the platform. It took me three hours to finish the Moves of the Diamond Hand demo, which is the first of a planned four chapters. Chapter two will be coming as part of Diamond Hand's early access release this year, and I think the self-contained nature of its first sandbox actually lends itself to being enjoyed in an episodic fashion, something that can always be a toss up with early access. You can check out Moves of the Diamond Hand's demo for yourself and wishlist the full game over on Steam.