Slot or Not is a roguelite luck based game that has you choose your items and throw them into a classic slot machine to see if you’ll be hitting big or striking out and having to restart your run.
In the current build of Slot or Not you can choose from up to three characters (with two that are coming later already teased) who each have their own unique trinkets and equipment. These serve as presets for the start of your journey, complete with gear leaving the rest of your run up to yourself and lady luck.
There are currently two available stages, with you fighting either fruit and plants in the first or a group of well dressed gangster rats (who all have much more lethal attacks to that of the first group).
Slot or Not has a simplistic art style with hand-drawn enemies and locations that are reactive to both your mouse movements and different attacks. Hit a lemon with a bleed attack? Then the lemon sprite will change to reflect that letting you easily see what status effects each character has.
There are many different weapons and items available, with melee weapons and ranged weapons each having different mechanics such as ammunition being needed for the ranged weapons making you choose whether to use your more powerful arsenal of guns over the less lethal but more reliable melee weapons.
You can also find a number of trinkets either from crates found on the map or the various shops dotted between encounters. These can be anything from damage multipliers to buffs/debuffs letting you fine tune your run to get the most out of your equipment.
You can also find periodic slot machine upgrades that allow you to increase either the rows or columns of the slots, letting you rack up bigger and better chances to do damage. Do be careful though as the enemies also get a chance to show up in the slots and with greater numbers can sometimes tip the odds in their favour.
You’ll also come across a lot of different instances while venturing deeper into the map, games of chance, random loot crates and even encounters with new characters can all be located by just playing through the game giving you more reasons to play again and again to discover every option possible.
It’s very easy to pick up every piece of loot in most games and just hoard everything but it’s actually a bit of a problem in Slot or Not. Every item you pick up has a chance to appear in combat and if you have too many items they can clog up your actions leaving you with very little synergy so I would highly advise picking weapons or items that complement each other.
A good example would be the Glass Rose, a broken bottle that inflicts decent damage and the bleed effect, pair this with something like the razor and you’ve got two weapons that inflict persistent damage between rounds even if you don’t land a hit. Another good combination is any ranged weapon that consumes ammo, combine this with the Makeshift Ammunition trinket and all of a sudden you have unlimited ammo at a 40% damage penalty which lets you keep blasting!
You can also customise Slotty the Slot Machine with different hats you can either earn or purchase while upgrading the slot machine adding a small amount of customisation to your runs. The first one I found was when you defeat the boss of the first area although it appears there are a number of different ones to collect.
If you’re into your slot-based games then be sure to check out our review of Clover Pit featuring similar games of chance in a much more grim circumstance but may scratch that itch of an incremental luck based game that both seem to offer.
With the many different combinations and items available in the pre release version I’m sure on the full release you can look forward to a larger pool or items as well as a few more characters to sink your teeth into and take as far as your run allows.
For those of you like myself that completed what the game currently has to offer there is also a New Game+ mode which allows you to pretty much infinitely run until you die although Slot or Not does mention that this is untested so could result in some pretty wacky combinations but also allows you to continue if you haven’t quite finished with this run yet.
If you would like to get your hands on a preview of Slot or Not consider signing up for the playtest, otherwise you’ll be able to buy it on release on Steam in May.
