The next surreal dice-rolling RPG from Cosmo D is a terrific follow-up to Betrayal at Club Low

Rejoice, dear readers, for today heralds the arrival of a new Cosmo D game. Technically, it’s episode 1 of a new Cosmo D game, as this latest project – Moves of the Diamond Hand – will be split into four separate chapters, and released in currently unknown intervals at a later date. Today marks the release of Chapter 1 in its entirety – as a free demo – and when Chapter 2 eventually arrives, it will shift into paid early access.

Moves of the Diamond HandDeveloper: Cosmo DPublisher: Cosmo DPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: 2025 with Chapter 1 out now as a free demo on PC (Steam)

But enough logistics chat. Onto the game. If you’ve been following Cosmo D’s work since his Off-Peak and The Norwood Suite days, you’ll know that each game in the loosely-connected Off Peak City-verse is usually quite different from the last. All of them share the same off-kilter tone and love of strange, undulating architecture and NPCs with haunting, dead-eyed stares, but how you navigate and interact with these pockets of dreamy, urban nightlife changes from one game to the next. Moves of the Diamond Hand, however, is almost a direct continuation of the dice-rolling skill checks from 2022’s Betrayal at Club Low, albeit with some added twists to game your dice even further.

Moves Of The Diamond Hand Teaser Trailer Watch on YouTube

You begin on a subway train with dreams of joining the mysterious Circus X, and a surprise encounter with an old friend slowly reintroduces the game’s crop of core skills. Like Betrayal at Club Low, they’re the important things in life: cooking, deception, music, observation, physique, wisdom and wit. All of them take the form of six-sided dice, and the more experience you gain from completing (or failing) certain tasks, the more you can pump those points into raising the numbers on those dice to give you a better chance of succeeding in later situations. As before, your opponents also have dice of their own you’ll need to contend with, and they’ll change depending on which course of action you decide to take.

But before you’re able to reach and infiltrate this circus that may not be a circus, you need to find a way out of both the train, and the station where you end up. This is what Chapter 1 consists of, and I had a very jolly two hours noodling around its platforms and secret tunnels, and rooting through bins and strangers’ pockets to find cash, items, keys and more to further my escape. The station’s in lockdown when you arrive, you see, as the Jade Bass AI companion for a certain mayor candidate has gone missing, and the detective in charge of coming to find it and question suspects is running late.