Demo for Thief’s Roulette Ready for a Spin

Full version of Zero Escape-inspired escape room thriller pushed back to spring on PC and Switch

Throwing a group of strangers together into an unfamiliar environment and forcing them to survive by some mix of cooperation, guile, and deceit has become a tried-and-true concept. The latest game to utilize this increasingly popular conceit is Thief’s Roulette, an upcoming puzzle adventure by hiromu656.

The premise is fairly simple: Set on a far-future Earth, fifteen individuals, including you, have been kidnapped by a mysterious woman calling herself Lady Luck. Proclaiming you “thieves, liars, and con men,” she has brought you to her casino to fight for your lives by completing all of her challenges in a game of both trust and deception. Success – and indeed your very survival – requires that you cooperate with others. And yet, “in a room full of liars, who can you trust?” You will be assigned to one of three groups forced to work together in order to solve seven escape-room-style puzzles that make up the bulk of the gameplay. The puzzles will be a familiar mix of inventory, item-combination, and logic puzzles, and each team’s goal is to solve them fastest. However, it’s the choices you make rather than your “proficiency for puzzle solving” that will most impact the story, as the developer wants to discourage “rushing through the gameplay.”

Inspired by the Danganronpa and Zero Escape series, Thief’s Roulette features a stylized aesthetic, with each of the seven challenge rooms being visually distinct and having their own themes. At the end of each challenge, a Marking Roulette mechanic randomly selects members of the losing teams for death. Two such marks and it’s all over. Adding even more intrigue, there are various tokens such as Trade and Reroll that provide special privileges to their holders. These tokens can be used but also given, traded, or stolen, providing an additional layer of strategy to keep in mind. The game will be split into a series of days, and after a pair of challenge rooms you will be able to spend time in Lady Luck’s casino to do as you wish, investigating the environment in free-roaming, first-person 3D perspective and trying to learn more about your situation and the other characters.

Following its successful Kickstarter campaign, production on Thief’s Roulette is largely complete, though an expected launch in the first quarter of 2023 on PC and the Nintendo Switch has been pushed back to sometime this spring. In the meantime, a playable demo is available to download on Steam to tide you over while you wait.