Gosh darn Cosmo D for his pizza representation. If I was better off financially and there was a better quality pizza joint in this town, maybe it would be a problem, but most of his games have given me a severe pizza craving. Guy should get a sponsorship.

And while Tales from Offpeak City Vol 1 is perhaps peak pizza-centricity, Betrayal at Club Low isn’t far behind. Brace yourself for cravings. If you’re intolerant of lactose, keep the Lactaid nearby. We’re headed for the intersection of pizza and espionage.

PIZZAIOLO-CENTRISM

Betrayal at Club Low is a major diversion from Cosmo D’s previous games. Everything so far has been different variations of walking sims, while Betrayal at Club Low is clearly an RPG. It’s not so much a JRPG, nor is it a CRPG, it leans much closer to the genre’s tabletop origins. It supposedly takes cues from independent zine tabletop RPG adventures, but I’m not savvy, so take that as hearsay.

Like previous Cosmo D joints, it begins with you being dropped off for a mission. This time, it’s the titular Club Low. Your job is to find an undercover agent and help them exfiltrate. It’s not as easy as it sounds, as the agent is currently trapped in the VIP area with Tales from Offpeak City antagonist, Big Mo.

Betrayal at Club Low is a continuation of the underlying narrative that has been built up throughout the Cosmo D anthology, but you don’t necessarily need to be familiar, as it’s all pretty abstract, and the important details are given to you. However, if you are familiar, you’ll notice a lot of details that link everything together and build it up. For example, the protagonist sure looks oddly familiar. Still, don’t sweat it if you haven’t played the previous games. Personally, this is where I started, and it was one of my favourite games of 2022.

SERVE UP A SLICE OF RPG

Like basically every RPG, Betrayal at Club Low is, at its core, a dice-rolling game. You have six stats: cooking, deception, music, observation, physique, wisdom, and wit. Each one has its own six-sided die. You use money to upgrade the sides of the dice, and you can either upgrade all sides at once or one side individually, with no advantage to buying in bulk. Each time you increase the value of a side, it raises the cost of the next increase. So, you could update each side of the dice to be worth two so every roll guarantees that value, or you could pile all your money onto one side to wipe out everything in your way with the power of astounding luck.

The checks have you roll against an opponent die, and the values for those die are set based on the difficulty of the task. Okay, ahem, so, your goal is to try and update stats to bypass these checks. You gain money through a combination of the value of your roll and pizza dice that you bake with ingredients that provide bonuses. You can upgrade your stats at any time, except after you’ve already started a roll.

Boring explanation, I know, and we aren’t done. Stat checks typically result in a modifier being applied to you. These are things like “Tired” or “Focused” and they provide additional dice with extra bonuses or penalties. These also apply against opponents, so if you’re trying to shmooze your way past someone, you can often try and soften them up with lesser actions; each one adding a penalty die to their roll. Likewise, if you fail a roll, not only might you get a penalty die, they may gain a bonus.

POISON IN MY BRAIN JUICE

All right, I think that’s good enough for a mechanical explanation. All this means that you are constantly seeing progress. You’re faced with new challenges and you decide what to focus on. You could, theoretically, pour your money into a couple of skills and brute force your way to the rescue. I haven’t done that, though. There’s a poison in my brain juice that makes me try and squeeze every last dollar out of the game. I doesn’t matter if I’ve already found a way past an obstacle, if there’s another obstacle on the other side, I’ll roll against that, as well, just to get more dollars to pour into stats. Yeah, no, I am not fun at parties.

But that’s fine, because Betrayal at Club Low is pretty easygoing about it. In fact, it’s pretty accommodating, as there’s a lot of advantages it provides you if you’re willing to build up all your skills and pass every check it throws at you. There are plenty of instances where you’re presented a number of different ways to pile on the penalty dice, which rewards you for taking a thorough, if unimaginative, route like myself.

And regardless of the approach I take, the greatest strength Betrayal at Club Low has is its sense of humour. Previous Cosmo D games had great levity heightened by fascinating weirdness, but Club Low packs a targeted attack on your funny bone. It’s weird, it’s absurd, but it’s also really sharp, both in the way it personifies the inanimate obstacles you come across and the absolute daftness of the folks you converse with.

It does it with a straight face, surrounding you with ridiculousness and acting like it’s totally normal and mundane. As a result, Club Low loses some of its atmosphere that made The Norwood Suite so captivating, but, like all Cosmo D games, it has its own tilt.

What I’ve banged on about whenever I bring up Betrayal at Club Low is the fact that it manages to be an RPG without really having much in the way of combat. In fact, it is, arguably, more RPG than most RPGs. You have a tonne of stats, and they each apply to different situations, but most of the situations are all topics of conversation. It’s more than just deciding if a character is going to cast a spell or pummel with their sword. Dice have been mistreated, but Betrayal at Club Low is, ironically, letting them know it’s okay to trust again.

There’s also a great deal of replay value, as it features around a dozen endings, including failures. It also brings along special modes and multiple difficulty modes. It’s small in terms of its locale, but it’s big on potential.

In many ways, Betrayal at Club Low loses the modern art edge that has helped define Cosmo D’s games, but in its place, it has better storytelling chops, solid gameplay, and a wicked sense of humour. It’s a wonderful marriage of the unique world that has been built up and an insidiously creative central concept. I am disgusted. I am disgusted it’s this good.

It’s really no wonder that Cosmo D is continuing with the RPG format for Moves of the Diamond Hand. With it return to a first-person perspective, I can only suspect that he’s trying to marry the excellent aesthetic of games like The Norwood Suite with the incredible dice loving. That’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to fly that close to the sun.

9/10

This review was conducted using a digital Steam version of the game. It was provided by the developer’s PR (like, yonks ago).