I am in trouble. The second boss of Tamarak Trail, a swirly-eyed, acid-spouting creature, has eaten my last useful die face. The final piece of a dice-flipping infinite combo dissolves into smoke as I cuss under my breath. I roll what remains and fumble the Xbox controller, accidentally mashing the A button on the dull gray castoff.
A trickle of energy vanishes from my yellow Resolve bar, the number inching perilously close to zero. I watch the vanished die face reconstruct itself and cuss again. I am an idiot. You can spend extra energy to resurrect exhausted actions. Extra energy I wasn’t planning to use. Soon, my onscreen detective crumbles into a skeleton, ending my run. “You know what? I deserve that,” I sigh, flicking through the menu and starting again.
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Tamarak Trail’s instantly evocative theming and animation plunges you into white-knuckled fights to either adapt or perish. The best moments fuse eerie folklore and the unpredictability of rolling physical dice against a backdrop of steep odds.
The dice-building roguelike doesn’t carve an easy path through the forest. A lopsided game economy, frustrating UI contradictions, and other porting woes creep through the cracks of an otherwise razor-sharp gameplay loop.
They See Me Rolling
You start as the Detective at the Sturgeon Lodge, a once-opulent secret society headquarters fallen into disrepair. Its proprietor, after a brief tutorial, tasks you with defeating the corruption festering in the center of the wood, snagging rare Garmonbozia flowers to upgrade the facilities. Improvements range from two additional classes—Magician and Tracker—to more ways to collect and upgrade resources. You can accumulate abilities and coins during your run, but only the Garmonbozias stay with you after death.
After selecting your hero and spending Garmonbozias, you pick your way across the map, a familiar criss-cross of battles, events, treasures, and shops connected by dotted lines. Each successful battle gives you coins and a choice between three new die faces to equip. Open a chest on the map to obtain a core. Installing a core to your dice gives them a passive perk for each roll. My favorite, a wizened stone toe, adds on shield every time the die is flipped. But others buff your resolve meter, remove status effects, and more. Tents for rest, stalls for shopping, exclamation points for randomized events—the usual staples.
Roll With the Punches
Your character—the Detective, Magician, or Tracker—has health signified by a yellow Resolve meter and the beating hearts above it. Resolve doubles as shield and energy for attacks, replenishing between turns. Dipping below empty on your Resolve bar damages one of your hearts. Run out of hearts and your character collapses into bones. The shared pool of Resolve means even trivial encounters can prove fatal. I fell most often to the ghostly animals and twitchy, shotgun toting bands of pigeons.
Each character has their own strengths, but gated progression reveals them over time. The Detective inflicts combos and status effects, the Magician fuses elemental attacks together to wreak havoc, and the Tracker marks prey while loading deadly bullets. Each comes with an ability you can activate for free once per battle. But no description meant I only used them when the situation was dire.
You roll your battle dice inside a wooden box in the middle of the screen, flicking with the analog stick to set angle and intensity before letting it fly. Your dice have physics, bouncing against the sides of the box or each other. Dice can get stuck between faces or flip sides after a roll. Soon I had my own tactile superstitions: spending certain die before rolling others, angling and pitching them just so.
Bouncing dice can help or hinder, depending on the application. Some faces add damage or statuses or damage to enemies with each bounce. Other attacks and defenses accumulate energy cost with each hit, making crowded playing fields a dance between risk and reward.
Rocky Rolled
Tamarak Trail‘s carefully composed mood is marred with inconsistencies. Typos, and in one case an exposed script variable, broke the spell in tutorials, events, and sometimes mid-battle. The UI is tiny and lacks scaling options. Compounded with the pretty but overly ornamental font in use for buttons, Tamarak Trail‘s user experience is rough early going. Each run is randomly generated, and it shows. Most form a tidy spiderweb of points, but occasionally a section devolves in a Family Circus tangle of dashed lines, sometimes making it impossible to parse your route.
Beyond the first few upgrades, obtaining even a single Garmonbozia can take multiple attempts. A Lodge upgrade grants one after each loss, but the cost of ten Garmonbozia feels a a little too hard-won. Defeating a boss or select options in random events grant you the flowers, but otherwise it takes clawing through tense fights for meager rewards. Additional classes cost just as much as the upgrades, if not more. Coupled with wildly variable shopkeeper prices, this economy doesn’t tilt in the player’s favor. Eerie survival tale aside, even the most wizened roguelike gives out compelling player tools on a regular basis.
The battle screen has its own problems. Pointing the cursor at enemies isn’t always relative to your position, requiring a bit of trial and error. Enemy status effects have full descriptions, but sometimes not when applied to the player. In protracted fights, I often put the game in Quick Resume while scouring the internet for a refresher. A small annoyance, but one a well-placed text box could easily fix.
Verdict: A Flawed but Fascinating Rollout
Tamarak Trail‘s compelling art style and battle system are ultimately weighed down by poor design choices. If you can push past the thicket of mild annoyances, the well-honed dice rolling mechanics shine through. Despite my hesitations, I kept rolling through tough bosses, mystifying character traits, and other less-polished moments. Hopefully a little additional work brings Tamarak Trail a devoted audience. While frustrating, the journey through the woods is worth saving.
Good
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Compelling battles. | Too-small user interface. |
| Evocative atmosphere and linework. | Steep upgrade and item costs. |
| Dice physics add the right amount of suspense. | Lack of consistent player information. |
| Occasional typos and breaks. |
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