Devil Dice is a puzzle game about standing on dice. That sounds like a joke, but it is the whole design. You control a small devil who runs across a grid crowded with oversized dice. You can run on the ground with the dice looming above you, or climb on top and move from die to die. Run in a direction while on top of a die and it rolls, turning a new face up.
The goal is simple to state and hard to do: group adjacent dice that share the same number of pips, in a set at least as large as that number. Four adjacent fours vanish. Three threes vanish. The dice sink slowly into the field before they disappear, and that slow sink is the door to everything else. Add another die to a set already going down and you get a chain reaction.
Shift developed Devil Dice. Sony Computer Entertainment published it for the PlayStation, with THQ handling North America. It came out in Japan in 1998, North America in 1998, and Europe in 1999. In Japan it is called XI, pronounced “sai.”
From Yaroze to a Million Sellers
Devil Dice started life on the Yaroze, Sony’s homebrew development platform, before Shift turned it into a commercial product. It is one of only a handful of games to make that jump. The game went on to sell a million copies. A demo version later arrived as a PlayStation Classic for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable on November 7, 2007.
That history matters less than what Shift did with the idea. Plenty of puzzle games give you a board and ask you to clear it. Devil Dice makes you the piece. The devil is not a cursor. He has weight and position, and the dice are terrain before they are targets.
Four Modes, One Idea
The game ships with four modes, and each one bends the same mechanic a different way.
- Trial — the arcade mode. Clear as many dice as possible, and score as many points as possible, before the grid fills up.
- Battle — you against one computer opponent. Both sides build chains and try to negate the other’s.
- Puzzle — solve set puzzles, clearing all dice within a limited number of steps or moves.
- Wars — quickfire multiplayer. Up to four computer opponents, or five human players with a multitap.
Trial is the mode most players will live in, and it is the right call. The grid filling up is a clock you can see. Every chain you build buys room, and every sloppy roll costs it.
Wars is the one worth rounding up friends for. Players damage each other by completing chains, and the last one standing wins. A multitap turns a single-player puzzle into something closer to a party game, which is a strange sentence to write about dice.
Puzzle mode hides a reward. Solve a whole row of puzzles and you unlock a picture you can then play on in Battle mode. It is a small thing, but it gives the mode a reason to exist beyond practice.
Some modes add different types of dice with different properties to raise the difficulty. That is the correct way to add variety to a puzzle game: change the rules of the pieces, not the number of them.
The Sinking Die Is the Whole Game
Chain reactions are where Devil Dice stops being clever and starts being good. A dying set is a window. Feed it and it grows. Miss the window and you have wasted a roll and possibly buried a corner of the grid you needed.
Chain reactions are possible by adding additional dice to a sinking set.
That one line is the game. Everything else — the devil, the grid, the pips — exists to set it up.
The controls are the risk. Rolling a die in the direction you run means your movement and your puzzle input are the same action. You cannot reposition without changing the board. Games that fuse movement and manipulation usually feel loose. Devil Dice does not, because the grid is small and the devil is fast.
A 1998 Puzzle Game That Still Holds
The presentation is spare in a way that has aged well. A bird’s-eye isometric view shows you the whole field. You always know what you are looking at. No camera tricks, no hidden information, no luck beyond what you create.
The million-seller figure is the part that surprises. Puzzle games rarely move that many units, and this one did it on a mechanic that takes a paragraph to explain and an hour to understand. Shift built it on a homebrew platform and still got it to retail, which says as much about Sony’s Yaroze program as it does about the game.
What holds up is the tension between the two things you are doing at once. You are solving a puzzle and you are managing space. Trial punishes you for thinking about only one of them. Wars punishes you for thinking about only yourself.
The weak spot is Puzzle mode. A limited number of moves is a fine constraint, but the picture unlock is thin compensation for puzzles that mostly teach you what Trial already taught you. It is the mode you finish and do not return to.
Everything else earns its place. Devil Dice is a puzzle game with a body, and the body is the point. You do not push blocks. You run across them, and they fall.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
