Moves of the Diamond Hand begins with a dire confrontation: a puddle of spilled bubble tea has muddied the exit you’re alighting the train from. Do you deftly leap away from the milky liquid and risk getting drenched, simply accept your unfortunate circumstances, or slurp the offending beverage to discover the delightfully chewy textures of its tapioca pearls? Whatever you end up choosing, the result is always entertaining, with the exchange just a slice of its absurd, psychedelic reality. It’s also very Cosmo D, whose games are set within the very idiosyncratic Off Peak city, and with Moves of the Diamond Hand poised to be his most extensive and ambitious work yet.
Turns out Moves of the Diamond Hand is also a ridiculously charming game. Off Peak is an ethereal city in perpetual twilight, its skyscrapers flanked by strange statues of pigeons with red glowing eyes, and even a giant hand twiddling away on top of buildings. Its inhabitants are oddly polygonal, with some figures imposed with semi-realistic visages. That’s to say that they look very otherworldly and even grotesque, and this uncanniness does feel even more pronounced with their stilted poses and animations. Meanwhile, giant pigeons coo inquisitively and gather around bins, while human-animal hybrids and clones live alongside regular folks; they hold a variety of jobs from food harvesters to pizza makers. Yet the locals are surprisingly down-to-earth, as they discuss familiar fears and anxieties while an election for the city’s new mayor draws close. The absurdity eventually sets in amidst the growing normalcy, and the eeriness evaporates; you did just try to drink bubble tea off the ground after all.
Dice galore
But you didn’t just stumble into Off Peak yourself. In fact, you’re here to join Circus X, a prominent academy for artists from musicians to crackerjacks of disguises. To do so means gaining enough prestige and essentially mastery of a given skill, such as cooking, deception, physique or wisdom. Like Cosmo D’s previous game Betrayal at Club Low, how Moves of the Diamond Hand engages its players is through plenty of dice rolling, a system that the developer has said, in an interview with Super Jump Magazine, is inspired by the narrative-focused tabletop RPG system Fate. The latter’s influence can be seen in the game’s non-traditional use of dice mechanics. To succeed in a given scenario or action, you’ll need to clinch a higher score against your opponent’s dice roll. Take the bubble tea scenario at the start; you can roll a physique, wisdom or cooking skill dice against the dastardly puddle, which will also have its own dice rolls. The best rolls out of three attempts is your score, but you aren’t rolling conventional six-sided dice here. Instead, you will likely be investing experience points in these skill dice to increase your score. These points are plentiful, and can be earned via dialogues or upon winning dice rolls.
Subsequently, additional dice that can give your rolls a boost or penalty are tossed into the mix. Condition dice, for instance, are predominantly earned when you succeed or fail in a previous action. You can, say, succeed in pickpocketing an exhausted security guard and earn the “Guilty” condition, with this becoming a die that can potentially reduce your score on your next roll. Or you can earn the “Inspired” condition after an exhilarating musical performance (in which you used a cheap guitar as a salad bowl), which can boost your subsequent action. Multiple condition dice can be accumulated, while other dice like items and disguises are used to manipulate your score. At the same time, each die has its own quirks too. For one, disguises need to be washed frequently as their numbers on the dice faces will deteriorate, becoming more of a liability than assistance, and that itself is yet another action—and dice roll—to be taken. If it sounds like a handful, don’t worry; it’s really more intuitive than it looks.
And what an incredibly sublime and in-depth system this is. If you’re familiar with Betrayal at Club Low, this is a more fleshed out version of the same dice system. But Moves of the Diamond Hand isn’t merely about outmanoeuvring people and inanimate obstacles in conversations. It’s also about feeding the worst of your impulsive tendencies, and the sheer thrill of getting away with making a gamble… sometimes. Winning with a poor set of dice may seem like an impossible gambit, but you can outperform your expectations out of sheer dumb luck and bravado. I once fixed a security monitor issue—a highly technical problem that requires the utmost finesse—by knocking on the screen a few times. I managed to placate an antagonistic fish by singing a sea shanty, when my previous attempts at crooning offended a pigeon guard so much that he pummelled me.
On the other hand, there’s a chance that more finicky players will attempt to save scum their playthrough—that is, reload every action to optimize their outcomes—but missteps are rarely punishing or result in lasting consequences. Not only will this make the playthrough enormously tedious, but failures also makes for hilarious consequences. Imagine getting utterly soaked from tripping into spilled bubble tea (my arch nemesis), or attempting to play the guitar with your feet but suffering from severe leg cramps. Don’t be afraid to embrace your harebrained antics.
Beneath the surrealism
At the heart of Moves of the Diamond Hand is an examination of its city’s power and capitalist structures—one that carries parallels to our own world—which is also cleverly underscored by the dice system itself. There’s a dizzying amount of activities you can busy yourself here, from trying to ingratiate yourself with Circus X, to learning more about the upcoming election in Off Peak. Its first chapter can be experienced as a free demo, but the early access version also includes a second chapter, choke full of surreal occurrences to relish. Once you’ve exited the train station, you’ll step into a sprawling neighbourhood, where you’ll get to learn more about the electoral candidates and the policies they espouse. You can canvass for them too if you like, and this is a performance made up of a series of uninterrupted dice rolls. The more successful rolls you get, the more the electorate becomes taken by your dazzling spiel and debating prowess.
Yet it’s also a reminder that canvassing is very much a performance you’re pulling off, potentially an act of “activist public relations” emphasized by how you can charm and lie throughout the scene to maximize your score. What’s less gamified, however, is the conversations you’ll hear from the inhabitants, from their woes about a clone candidate who may not have humanity’s best interest, to the clones themselves who are concerned about their eroding voting rights. That’s the most quietly radical aspect of Moves of the Diamond Hand; beneath the game’s playfully surreal veneer is a reality that’s pervasively local and empathetic. You’ll not only learn more about the quirky electoral candidates, but also about the denizens whose lives will be impacted by the outcomes of the election.
More nooks and crannies of this invigorating neighbourhood begs exploration, as they contain anecdotes that delve into not just the economics of survival, but also the commoditization of art. The owner of a beloved deli is plagued by the limits of his own creativity. There’s an intimate alcove home to a dedicated community of music lovers, dancing to a small live band. And on the other side of the road is a hoity-toity jazz club that hires clone musicians, who are a much cheaper and predictable resource than human bands. All these scenes are undoubtedly influenced by Cosmo D’s past experiences as a jazz musician in the underground New York scene, but they are also pertinent conversations to have in our age of thoughtlessly generated art and music.
It’s thus a shame that Moves of the Diamond Hand is currently in early access, because I can’t wait to devour everything else Cosmo D has to offer. For now, the game can only be played till chapter two, with subsequent chapters gradually released over this year and the next, including a climatic showdown with the shadowy cabal that’s the eponymous Diamond Hand. Till then I’ll continue to explore the hidden depths of its hypnotizing, Kafkaesque city while avoiding its duplicitous bubble tea puddles.
