This puzzle game leaves your fate at the roll of the dice, the difference is that in I Am Die you are the die yourself.
I Am Die is a fully interactive puzzle game where you play as a die, rolling around, completing challenges and manoeuvring around obstacles. Using your controller you have full control over the 360-degree direction of the die as you try to complete sequential levels. The graphics are clean and easy to understand which makes playing a pleasant experience.
From the way the levels and challenges are presented, it is clear that I Am Die was intended to have a casual, easygoing playstyle. This design choice makes for a fun puzzle game, and the movement restrictions mean that boosts and double jumps are familiar but different.
The main concept and goal here is that you need to make your way around a level, interacting with objects and positioning yourself in a way where you can guide a ball to a designated hole. This then unlocks a dome which houses the key, you then take this key to the end tile where you match up the number and finally go through the exit to complete the level.
Your skills are tested in terms of a gradually increasing difficulty and complexity curve as you go through its stages. It is very player-friendly, with welcome tutorials and instructions present right from the very start.
All of that said, the mechanics and physics are one of the major negatives here; whilst it’s fun to play, it feels very random and unpredictable at times. This defies the idea of player-oriented decision-making and, in my opinion, takes away from the overall experience.
Some features in the game seem unnecessary and simply too much. At times I felt that it needed to scale back some of its ideas to a more basic level so that the foundations could be perfected before being built on. An example would be the interface on your screen: a lot of the features don’t tell you what they do or what they are for and this makes it difficult to utilise them correctly.
The art style and overall concept make it feel familiar due to its similarity to a few other well-known games on the market — the biggest and most popular example would be “Golf With Friends”. That said, Golf With Friends is notoriously easy to pick up and play, while — as I previously discussed — clustered UI features and the bizarre choice to have this PC game require a controller don’t do I Am Die any favours.
It isn’t all bad, however. Despite its similarities to other games on the market, I Am Die offers an interesting take on the puzzle game genre.
I Am Die is available now for PC, through Steam.