In my twenties, a night out at the club was the highlight of my week, especially if there was a DJ playing whom I especially loved. I don’t mean one of those gargantuan Ministry of Sound superclubs where you needed a map to find the bathroom. I’m talking about a small, humble neighborhood club with appropriately watery drinks, cool dark alcoves, and a tiny dancefloor where you could work your way into a higher state of consciousness amid a throbbing constellation of moving bodies. I haven’t done that in decades, but tonight I’m bringing it all back for a night out in Off-Peak City – a surreal metropolis filled with anthropomorphic brownstones, hallucinogenic puddles, and some urgent business at the inimitable Club Low.
Betrayal at Club Low reviewDeveloper: Cosmo D/Cosmo D StudiosPublisher: Cosmo D/Cosmo D StudiosPlatform: PCAvailability: Out September 9 on PC and Mac
The brain behind the Off-Peak universe is composer/musician and game designer Cosmo D, who makes brilliantly eccentric narrative adventures that revolve around music, performance, and good old fashioned capitalism. The games can be enjoyed individually, but they’re all cohesive branches of a much bigger and weirder tree; The Norwood Suite (2017) remains a personal favorite for the way it marries the mundane with Off-Peak’s tantalizing mythology, and Betrayal at Club Low is tonally and thematically no different. But as a narrative-driven dice game (the first time the Off-Peak world has embraced such a drastically different mechanic) Cosmo D has sagely tapped into the insatiable lizard brain of my long-dormant inner club kid – after my first playthrough I’m riding the invincible high of a successful night out, and immediately want more.
I play a humble pizzaiolo-spy who works for The Circus, an enigmatic intelligence agency. In this world, pizza is a cultural cornerstone that commands serious respect and craftsmanship. My acerbic handler Murial appears with a mission: infiltrate Club Low and rescue a fellow agent from a local thug, Big Mo, who appeared in 2020’s Tales From Off-Peak City. Betrayal continues Tales’ secret-operative-as-pizzaiolo thread, but where previous games were structured more like exploratory point-and-click vignettes, this one is more of a study in strategy and social engineering.
Tonight, it’s all about cooking “pizza dice” with different toppings at conveniently placed ovens. Some toppings are multipliers that increase the amount of tips I get from giving out pizza, some replenish my energy and nerve bars, and others manipulate my opponent’s dice. Cash goes toward bolstering skills like Observation, Wisdom, and Wit, which are reflected in my skill dice. The dice are my only friends in a club full of people with their own private agendas. I realize, on my second run, that the game leans toward Deception, Physique, and Music as the most useful skills, at least on the “Typical Thursday” and “Wild Night Out” difficulties.