I will never not be enamoured with weird games. And Betrayal at Club Low is a weird, weird game.

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3387190694

Betrayal at Club Low is an RPG where you play as a character you never imagined you could be, in a world that has no reason to exist. You play as a scaled-down, pizza-slinging—and yet equally chaos-inducing—Dr. Manhattan, striding into an otherworldly nightclub to rescue a colleague from flamingo stew-consuming gangsters. Through a combination of wit, guile, and pizza cheffery, your actions determine the fate of everyone in the nightclub.

Somehow, that description doesn’t begin to cover the sheer weirdness that is this fever dream of a game.

At first blush, Betrayal at Club Low may not look particularly impressive. Its graphical style, while unique in its colour scheme, isn’t unique in how its characters look, feel, and move. Indeed, with the exception of my pizzaolio friend, I’m sure I’ve seen many of these characters and their jerky movements in other games before. However, beneath the jarring surface, there’s a decently complex structure just waiting for someone like me to figure out how to min-max it, fail utterly, and then rob an entire nightclub to try to make myself feel better.

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3387190818

Betrayal at Club Low uses a skill system not unlike those found in most RPGs. Players can use the money they earn from skill checks and pizza delivery to buy upgrades in useful and relevant skills, such as athletics, wisdom, and cooking. These skills are then put to the test against checks in a dice-based system, with dice rolls being modified by the various circumstances the players have put themselves in over the course of their shenanigans. Players might have positive dice modifiers from previous checks they’d passed with aplomb, negative ones from checks they’d failed, or the various effects their pizza dice might apply to them. To succeed at the game, players need to balance where to invest their limited funds, how to navigate their dice modifiers, and how best to stack modifiers to their advantage.

Except all of that explanation implies that the point of the game is to manipulate dice to succeed at checks, or at least that success is a goal worth striving for. At about the point I was talking the DJ’s mother out of her mask so I could unhinge the DJ enough to leave his booth so I could DJ and thus be king of the dance floor, I realised the point of this game was never success, or at least not success in any traditional sense. Betrayal at Club Low subscribes to the Disco Elysium definition of “success,” one in which failing a check just sets the player down a different path that might be just as, if not more, interesting than the one presented by success.

https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3387190944

The delightfulness of Betrayal at Club Low is not just in its bizarre atmosphere and strange world. Instead, there’s something glorious about the bigger idea that it encapsulates, and the way it chooses to structure what a game can actually be.

Traditionally, games have had some sort of success criteria, whether that be driving a little car over the finish line first, rescuing the princess, or nuking New Jersey off the face of the Earth. Players are meant to strive for some goal, gaining the skills over the course of play to succeed in that goal. Betrayal at Club Low is part of a class of games that, while they do have a plot and an ending, see reaching that ending as a disappointment rather than the point of the game.

For Betrayal at Club Low, Disco Elysium, Road 96, and games like them, the point is to exist in the moment, exploring and bouncing off the walls of some virtual world, and treating it as a playpen rather than striving for some goal imposed by the fact the games are meant to have an ending. The fun of Betrayal at Club Low is not in seeing if I can rescue my colleague—it’s in seeing what impact my shiny blue coat that is absolutely 100% not stolen and definitely mine has on the world around me. It’s in living in that moment, not caring about consequences, or letting what few consequences that do happen roll off into the gutter of might-as-well-not-exist.

These games are escapism in its purest form. They’re escapism not only from the drudgery of reality and its expectations but also from the concept of the modern world itself. There is no striving, no improvement, no sense that everything needs to be building up to something grander and some conclusion that will look great in the eventual obituary. There’s just the here, the now, and whatever we choose to make of it.

This is the joy I found in Betrayal at Club Low. It’s a weird little game with a weird little premise, but its sheer zany escapism is an absolute delight. I do not understand the world, but equally, I don’t believe I have to. It’s not a world built for understanding. It’s a world built to be experienced, and I will do so in spades.

Developer: Cosmo D Studios
Genre: RPG
Year: 2022
Country: United States
Language: English
Time to complete: 2 hours

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One of the best CRPG experinces I've ever had

Betrayal at Club Low is a game absolutely oozing with style and game feel. I was recommended the game by some friends and decided to try it out - the story concept just reeled me in, and I'm a sucker for dice-rolling narrative games. The gameplay was very addicting - rolling dice, leveling them up, seeking out encounters to use and get rid of conditions. Mix and matching the pizza ingredients. It's super satisfying! The characters were charming, silly, and very interesting. The music was also really good. I guess the only drawback was that, with the story, I didn't know this game was so interconnected to other games already released - but that isn't a bad thing, just meant I was kind of confused when getting ending #9. Perhaps there's just still more for me to see.

The game is also surprisingly replayable, especially if you try the other modes. The 4AM mode really spices things up and makes things feel pretty different, allowing for more fun moments where you can wager on encounters and make sick dice combos.