Part 4 (Dec 2025) · #5 of 10 in that tierWatch the moment (0:24:07)
Die in the Dungeon
- Developed by
- ATICO
- Published by
- HypeTrain Digital, Sidekick Publishing
$14.99
Fight your way through a mysterious dungeon in this deck-building, turn-based roguelike game where you don't use cards, but dice! Deal with enemies by combining powerful dice on your board, boost their effects with magical relics, and risk it all hoping for a good roll on unexpected encounters.
Consensus
B74.1/100
Steam players92.1% positiveVery Positive3,599 reviews
VG Insights estimate ↗≈200K copies · ≈$1.8M gross
What creators say
Ranked Apr 2023 · #19 of 42 in that tierWatch the moment (2:03:54)
What players say
A turn-based roguelike deckbuilder by ATICO where you use dice instead of cards, slotting attack, defense, healing and booster dice onto a character-specific board and boosting them with relics, starring cute pixel-art frogs fighting insects.
Players like it a lot: Steam shows Very Positive (about 92% of roughly 3,600 reviews) and the developers and publisher (HypeTrain Digital, Sidekick Publishing) got it through Early Access (started Feb 21, 2025) to a 1.0 launch on May 1, 2026, with Switch also mentioned. Critics coverage is thin (two OpenCritic reviews, both very positive, and no Metacritic score). Praise centres on the dice-on-a-grid puzzle, pixel art and music, and an approachable on-ramp for genre newcomers. The recurring complaints are slow, long runs, builds converging on the same few strategies, enemies that do not scale so stalling or full-blocking works, and a lack of character and build variety. Reviewers who stay long (endgame players) are markedly more positive than those who bounce in the first hours.
Players love
- Swapping cards for dice placed on a shaped board turns each turn into a spatial optimisation puzzle; reviewers call it a fresh take that changes how you plan, not just a reskin
- Pixel art and character/enemy design (cute frogs vs. bugs) are the most universally praised element, along with a well-liked soundtrack
- Combos can get very deep, for example once you can change faulty dice; long-time players say the synergy space is expansive
- Approachable: tooltips get new players going quickly, and it is described as a good gateway into the genre
- Four characters with different board shapes and sizes, plus artifacts and curses that alter how dice, board and enemies interact
- Events can be played around with your dice and many can be skipped if your dice are strong, which players find more engaging than event screens in peers
- Active, community-minded dev team: enemy design contests and community lore writing, regular Early Access updates, free Origins demo
- Good value at $14.99 with lots of hours of playtime reported by fans (some with several hundred hours)
Common complaints
- Runs and individual fights drag; many reviewers report runs of 60-90+ minutes, with enemies that have very high HP and low damage and no pressure to end fights
- Board readability degrades late: stacked effects on one tile and huge boosted numbers become hard to parse, to the point of not knowing what happened in some fights
- Builds converge on one or a few viable strategies, often stacking block and infinite or near-infinite combos; many dice offered in early acts feel like they make your deck worse
- Balance swings between trivial and brutal: some players finish with block in the hundreds and lose almost no runs, while others hit a wall at the higher ascension levels (D3 to D8)
- Characters feel too similar to some players, especially the two block-focused ones, and there are few non-attack/block dice types in practice
- Relics are seen as either underwhelming or game-solving, with weak payoffs for build themes such as glass or gold dice
- Accessibility gaps: constant looping animations that cannot be turned off triggered migraines/motion sickness for some, and the pixel font is hard to read for some; Steam Deck controller support was reported as poor
- Lore is thin in game with much of it reportedly living in the Discord
- Several negative reviewers say it lacks staying power or 'sauce' compared with Slay the Spire, Peglin or Astrea: numbers just go up, decisions repeat each turn, and progression feels flat
Can feel tedious
- Long, slow combats and runs with simple decisions repeated every turn
- Levelling characters to unlock content and pursue completion, which fans themselves call grindy
- Having to re-read dice descriptions and edge cases each turn, which makes it feel like homework to some
- Late-game number inflation and high-difficulty negative modifiers that push toward infinite-combo builds
- Persistent animations and small pixel text for motion- or migraine-sensitive players
What's unique
- Dice rather than cards, placed into a per-character grid board where position and adjacency matter
- Attack, defense, healing and booster dice colour-coded, with boosters and copy effects that feed off neighbours
- Starting gear and dice that are worth keeping all run, unlike the disposable starter cards in many Slay the Spire-likes
- Began as a 2021 game jam entry and itch.io demo and grew into a Steam release with a community-involved development style
- Frogs-versus-bugs presentation with a gambling-flavoured risk/reward layer on events
Players want
- Add a fast mode or option to skip or speed animations to shorten long runs
- Improve readability: clearer display when several effects share a tile, and a breakdown view showing how relics and modifiers change each die's numbers
- Rebalance so more builds are viable, and so blocking every turn or rejecting all dice rewards is not the dominant approach; make enemies scale or add pressure to long fights
- More dice types, characters, relics with bigger build-around payoffs, and more run-to-run variety
- Add an accessibility mode (toggle for wiggling animations, readable font) and proper Steam Deck controller support
- Reduce the grind of levelling every character for unlocks and 100% completion, and make higher difficulties less reliant on cheesy infinite combos
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Steam tags
Early AccessTurn-Based StrategyDungeon CrawlerChoices MatterRoguelike DeckbuilderCard GameCard BattlerDeckbuildingRogue-likeRPG
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Tier list Part 4 (2025)
Die in the Dungeon is an early-access, turn-based roguelike dice game where you place unique dice on a board and combine their effects to fight through floors to a final boss. He finds it genuinely unique and has had a blast, noting a huge amount of content and regular updates. However, it is overwhelming for new players, the small-text art style hurts readability, balance is uneven, and runs can drag. He places it in high B for now, with potential to rise at full release.
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