Prestige is one of my favorite skills for leveling up in RPGs and games adjacent to RPGs. Maybe it’s my lack of social interaction, but I feel empowered by imagining being able to speak fluently, flirt or simply make eye contact with a seller. row. For decades now, games like Fallout and Mass Effect have enthralled me with their ability to make people obey their will with a single stat and live vicariously through any sweet-talking parasite. Which one I created. However, it turns out that those and many other games are actually pretty bad at exploring conversation in engaging or meaningful ways. The betrayal at Club Low opened my eyes to the possibility of dialogue.
Betrayal at Club Low is part of Cosmo D’s Off-Peak series of games, which can only be described as a series of interactive modern art exhibits that have snowballed into something bigger. Additional gameplay features have been incorporated to make the various Off-Peak titles more than just walking simulators. Still, even with clear signs of progress in all of these games, Betrayal at Club Low is a unique experience. The real star of previous titles in the series is the whimsical world, but here it is the dialogue.
The setup for Betrayal at the Low Club is clear: You’re dropped into the popular club with the goal of exploiting a secret agent from beneath the local crime arrow. To infiltrate, you use the guise of a pizza delivery guy. It should be easy for an established pizzaiolo like you. Unfortunately, all of your conversational skills start out as a mess, and you need to spend money to use them wherever useful.
Unlike your typical RPG where your success in dialogue is largely determined by your charisma and possibly rolling the dice if you’re feeling sassy, Betrayal at Club Low makes dice king. It’s more like a pen-and-paper RPG, taking cues from the mini-adventures printed in pulp magazines.
You still have seven base stats, but instead of just giving you a solid baseline to work on, each stat represents a six-sided dice, and you spend cash to strengthen individual sides its odd. This gives you the freedom to balance your dice, but you can choose to keep all their faces set to 0 and increase the sixth face up to the number nine. Like in a more typical RPG, you can choose to specialize, then focus only on completing quests your skill set allows, or you can build a balanced character over and try to accomplish anything. You can hone your skills to the moon, or if you’re more of a challenge, you can try to finish with the bare minimum.
It is a system that is both complex and extremely simple. What’s unique about it, however, is that it makes the dialogue as deep and engaging as any RPG’s combat system. Conversations are now adversarial, with you aligning your word skills against your opponent’s better judgment. This is made better by the stat buff options, meaning that, while your story may seem far-fetched and outlandish, it’s hard not to trust someone with such an incredible coat .
It’s ridiculously engaging, and while some might scoff at the game’s element of chance, it’s one of the fundamental principles of RPGs. While the genre has expanded beyond the confines of tabletop rules, it still functions as an abstraction of systems like damage. It is sometimes simplified to varying degrees, but mechanics such as critical hit are often decided by chance. If anything, Betrayal at Club Low is more faithful to its roots.
As I played through it, I kept imagining what its system would mean for games like Mass Effect’s romance system. Instead of just being a dialogue tree where you listen to the life story of the person you care about until it can eventually lead to sex, you have to build your path there in a unique way. You may be able to charm right out of the gate, but you can reduce your chances of being rejected by listening. Every time you successfully demonstrate empathy, your enhanced dice gain leverage over that person. Okay, I’m making it sound creepy, but is rolling around for seduction worse than clicking through a dialogue tree until you reach the end?
The betrayal at Club Low showed me the flaw in the way games approach the conversation. I’ve always said that, when it comes to video games and their relationship to violence, ballistics are easy and discussion hard. Building dialogue based on the same chance found in Disco Elysium and dice-heavy gameplay like Citizen Sleeper, Betrayal at Club Low makes discussion an equally engaging part of the gameplay by using systems already common in video games. It may not be right for every game, but it proves that our charisma-centric characters deserve better.
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