It turns out tabletop-style role playing and dice made out of pizza toppings are two great tastes that taste great together. At least they are in Betrayal at Club Low, the latest game from Cosmo D, indie gaming’s greatest surrealist.
In Betrayal at Club Low, you have been dispatched to the titular club to rescue a teammate who is in too deep. Before you enter, your fixer, Murial, gives you a pizza delivery uniform and an insulated pizza backpack, and tasks you with infiltrating the club and getting your pal out. To do that, you’ll need to find a way in, make it past laser grids, find a method of exfiltration, and convince the big boss, Mo, to let him go.
As in Disco Elysium —the most obvious influence on Betrayal at Club Low — there are no combat mechanics. You might get into a fight, but that plays out the same way that every other interaction does: with a roll of the dice. And we need to talk about those dice. As you explore Club Low and the streets and alleyways outside it, you will find pizza-making stations and caches of ingredients. Some of these ingredients are traditional, like pepperoni, while others, like flamingo meat, are for those with a more outre palate. At the stations, you can assemble the ingredients you find into a pizza which — don’t think too hard about this — becomes a die you roll for bonuses in each encounter.
Like I said, it’s surreal, but that’s par for the course for Cosmo D, creator of Off-Peak, a fictional universe that includes four games, Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite, Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1, and now, Betrayal at Club Low. His work consistently offers up bizarre sights like sentient, talking buildings that look like human heads, CDs that make the listener’s head explode, and a giant who’s just too nervous to play the piano set he was hired to perform. Absurd as it is, the world is also incredibly grounded. Characters with fleshed out personal histories recur from one game to another, as do artistic scenes and looming corporations. Though a character might point their fingers into the sky and blast off like a rocket after they’re done talking with you, the world of Off-Peak nevertheless feels like a real, lively place.
That’s still the case in Betrayal at Club Low, though in many other ways Cosmo D’s latest is a departure from his previous work, which have all been first-person adventures. Since Saturn V in 2014, his work has gotten increasingly elaborate. In that game, you can walk around a space and listen to music. That’s really it. But, in Off-Peak you were tasked with reassembling a shredded train ticket, in The Norwood Suite, you needed to find the pieces of a costume in order to gain access to a dance party, and in Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1, you made pizzas and delivered them, snapped photographs, solved puzzles, and more. Though all of these games could be described as ‘walking sims’, each was more mechanically rich than the one before.
Which makes Betrayal at Club Low all the more interesting. BaCL, immediately, looks different, swapping the first-person perspective of previous games for an isometric viewpoint, as if Cosmo D’s familiar aesthetic had been transplanted into Grim Fandango. BaCL is also Cosmo D’s most mechanically dense game yet. Conversation has always been a big part of his games, populated as they are with wonderfully written characters who speak in dialogue that straddles the gap between naturalism and the stylized speak of screenwriters like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson. Here, dialogue is the primary mechanic, with each conversation requiring a roll of the dice to complete. You can always walk away if you don’t have the stats, but each conversation has multiple paths to resolution. You can impress a DJ character with your knowledge of the music they’re playing in the club. You can wow a guard with an interpretive dance. You can merge your consciousness with a security panel using your powers of observation.
As with the toppings on the pizza dice you roll, you can have it your way. Though Betrayal at Club Low is short — Steam clocked my playthrough at four hours — it’s full of options. You can always go the more traditional route, and level up your strength. But, when flamingo meat is on the menu, isn’t it a little boring to choose pepperoni?