There is a very specific type of indie game design that immediately bypasses my brain’s logical centers, and it usually involves a developer populating their world entirely with weird, slightly misshapen little idiots. I am a total sucker for it. So when I saw Slots & Daggers, a roguelite dungeon crawler completely built inside a clunky, monochrome gambling machine sitting in a fantasy pub, I thought it looked right up my alley.
The Loop
Slots & Daggers is one of a plethora of recent gambling roguelites, with you pulling the handle on a one armed bandit like Clover Pit. Where in Clover Pit you’re using relics and calls from a mysterious man on the other side of a phone to manipulate the RNG of the icons pre set in the machine, in Slots & Daggers you get to choose exactly what appears on the reels. You start each run by loading your reels with basic items like rusty daggers for flat damage, wooden shields to absorb hits, and coins to line your pockets. You yank the handle, watch the icons blur past, and smash the physical stop buttons to lock in your fate. Land a matching three of a kind, and you trigger a massive critical burst that completely demolishes whatever chucklesome goblin or angry egg is staring at you from the pixelated screen above.
On paper, the strategy comes from customising your machine between rounds at the tavern shop. It’s supposed to be an exercise in clever probability management. If you purge the basic junk and stack your reels with nothing but high tier poison modifiers and circular saws, you drastically increase your odds of hitting a game ending combo. Some of the icons have skill checks associated with them, and there’s a relic that repins that reel if you hit a critical, meaning that if you get good enough at hitting the top end of the light bar on the greatsword, you can essentially win a fight in one go (RNG permitting).
The issues is that the balance feels a bit out of whack. Some of the relics seem incredibly situational, with high gold costs per use that feel almost impossible to maintain without filling your reels with coin bags thus removing your ability to deal consistent damage, or gain enough shield to survive.
The RNG Problem
This creates a weird design paradox where the game is simultaneously too easy to exploit, yet entirely at the mercy of pure randomness. In a deck-builder like Slay the Spire, a bad hand is a puzzle to be solved with the tools you have. In Slots & Daggers, because everything is tied to a single slot pull, a bad roll is just a bad roll.
There are moments early in a run where you can have a beautifully streamlined reel layout, only for the machine to give you the absolute worst possible distribution of icons right when a boss is winding up a massive attack. You do get minor tools to mitigate this later, including spending chips to slow down the reels or nudge them a few spaces, but the sheer volume of layers of RNG means you’re frequently just sitting there watching the game play itself out. When you win, it often feels less like a triumph of tactical planning and more like the machine just finally paid out. If you sit down to marathon it for longer than fifteen minutes, the familiar monotony of spinning the same reels starts to set in heavily.
I play a lot of roguelites and I’ve got to say that this problem isn’t unique to Slots & Daggers. As more and more of them lean more into pure gambling, I feel my sense of satisfaction when pulling out a run winning synergy getting less and less. And it makes losing feel worse too. Hit a critical shield when the enemy is going to hit for 100 magic damage – well tough, the shield only blocks physical, GGs back to the start.
The Vibe
Where the game does manage to pull itself back is its atmosphere. Visually, it adopts a gorgeous, green tinted Game Boy aesthetic, using heavy pixel art shadows to make the cabinet feel like a physical, weathered object resting on a grime stained table. The monster designs are an absolute joy, full of jerky, minimalist animations that are just bursting with personality.
The audio engineering is also fantastic, treating your brain to pure arcade satisfaction. Every single pull of the lever produces a heavy, mechanical whir, the buttons have a loud, plastic clack, and the cascade of coins dropping into the prize tray makes a beautiful, crisp PLING PLING PLING sound. Combined with a soundtrack that blends dusty, old school hip hop drum loops with retro chiptune melodies, it gives the entire experience an incredibly cosy, late night pub energy.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, those stylistic high notes can only carry the thin mechanical framework so far. The main campaign is relatively brief, clocking in at around four to five hours, and once you unlock the endless survival “Egg Arena” mode, the lack of real structural variety starts to show.
Slots & Daggers is a highly experimental, gorgeously stylised arcade distraction, but as a robust roguelite, it struggles to find its footing. The over reliance on pure slot randomness strips away the satisfying tactical agency that makes the genre so addictive in the first place, leaving you with a game that is fun for a quick, spin on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but lacks the depth to keep you hooked for the long haul.
Slots & Daggers was reviewed on Xbox Series X. Gamer Social Club would like to thank the devs and publisher for the code.
