Whilst I like the concept and events in Sigilfarer: A Dice-Rolling Roguelite, samey combat and sudden progressional brick walls left me frustrated.
I’m a bit of a fiend when it comes to deckbuilding roguelites. Give me a Fights in Tight Spaces or Monster Train 2 and you can leave me happily playing for countless hours. I’ve played very little in the way of dice-building games though, save the delightful Dice Forge board game. Sigilfarer: A Dice-Rolling Roguelite — Sigilfarer from henceforth — caught my attention with its lovely art style, explorative gameplay, and dice building gameplay. Sadly, the execution left me more annoyed than enamoured.
There’s a plot of sorts, but it’s pretty ancillary to the actual game. There’s some sort of encroaching evil, and you lead a crew out into the wilds, protected by a magical stone known as Anchorite to discover the source of it. There’s probably more to it if you wanted to dig deeper, but the reality is that many of these games are mechanics-forward and the story can take a back seat.
Anyway, you head up a crew of four adventurers riding in their caravan, driving back monsters that threaten your city. Initially, you have your four pretty standard character archetypes, being a spellcaster, tank, healer, and damage dealer, each of whom start the run with their own unique die. You can unlock subclasses as you work through the meta progression that changes how those dice are structured if you want to try a different approach. As you might expect, your magic user’s die has faces that generate mana for spells, whilst your tank rolls predominantly shields that can be assigned to block damage. Your healer doles out healing, shockingly, and your fighter gets mostly attack rolls.
Now, this presents something of an issue right off the bat. Each character’s dice is very specialist, though can be adapted somewhat. Your characters can be defeated in combat, removing their die from the battle, only recovering if you win, albeit with a debuff for the rest of the run. This raises the very serious issue that if your fighter gets knocked out, then you have next to no attack options and you pretty much lose the fight due to not being able to attack. The same is true if you lose your tank, as suddenly you have no defence options. This is a massive problem if you lose any party member, to the point that one character loss pretty much ends your run. I found this wildly frustrating, as a couple of unlucky rolls — and remember this is a dice game so random chance is always a thing — and you’re back to square one.
You can adapt dice somewhat by finding items to equip your party, but most of these simply increase the number on each face making them more effective, and do little to give you more options or mitigations for potentially losing a party member mid battle. Each party member is critical, and because you only have one defender and one healer, your resources are often spread too thin to keep things going. Some of the subclasses go a little way towards supporting this, but the meta progression is pretty slow and it’ll be a while before you can get to any of this.
I will grant that some of the items you collect are pretty interesting, and can grant fun buffs and debuffs. I particularly liked the one that caused a die to be doubly effective when targeting someone else with the matching die value. Some were near worthless though, making a face more powerful but then deactivating it for the rest of the battle. I did like that the characters could be seen equipping the items you gave them.
Between battles, you direct your caravan around the map, interacting with events, taking on battles, and heading towards your primary or secondary objectives, which tend to be battles. The events are at least interesting though, with you needing to assign dice to what outcome you feel would be most beneficial. Some events give bonuses to certain dice faces, and you can often activate more than one outcome if you’re fortunate enough. They’re pretty standard fantasy events, but it felt nice to be able to manipulate a group of bad ‘uns into giving you all their stuff.
In terms of presentation, I really did like the low poly design of the characters and world as a whole. The aforementioned fact that your people show the items they’re equipped with is nice too. The world map isn’t always so great as often it isn’t entirely clear which hexes can be traversed, sometimes leading you to taking a path you didn’t want. Sounds and music are nice enough, but they barely registered beyond them being there.
I really wanted to like Sigilfarer. The dice building was interesting, and each character having a unique starting die was neat. But the way you’re railroaded through your time in the field is frustrating to the point that on more than a few occasions I just ended up in fights that I would lose within the first two turns. It’s frustrating, and even with the meta progression giving you certain bonuses, it wasn’t enough to overcome those annoyances. It’s a shame as there’s a good game in here wanting to come out, so I’m hoping the developers roll into a new project with a bit more success.
Sigilfarer: A Dice-Rolling Roguelite is available now on PC.
