Bonereader initially excited me when I first saw it. Skeletons are my thing, and it’s a dice-oriented take on Balatro, a game I enjoyed. Unfortunately, it ended up letting me down slightly, but it did provoke some thoughts on game design and aesthetics. That might sound like an instant condemnation, but if you’re heavily into deckbuilder roguelikes, Bonereader is an inexpensive, interesting case study or spin on the genre that I would cautiously recommend. For most other readers though, I’m afraid it’s less likely to grab you.
The crux of the game is Yahtzee/dice poker, using by default five 6-sided dice, but the scoring combinations (e.g. pair, full house, etc.) available at any given time are limited to cards that you draw to your hand from your deck. If you’re unfamiliar, the moment-to-moment loop is quite simple and easy to learn, so the rules shouldn’t be a worry. The macro deckbuilding aspect comes from buying and selling selected cards for your build, and new kinds of dice with different probabilities and mechanics, such as a ‘lucky’ die that has a higher chance of rolling a three, or a d20 (twenty-sided die) that gives you bonus points on a twenty but negative points on a one.
At the start, the onboarding experience was a little difficult, as figuring out how to use the main mechanic of actually scoring the dice took a few minutes – the game did not properly explain what to click, and there happened to be no valid combinations either. Luckily once that was figured out, everything was rather self-explanatory, but this was not the only case of a lack of polish.
While the game was okayishly balanced for the first two areas I did (which is not that far into the game), in the third area all balance went out the window once my ‘use any combination of dice’ card levelled up to level 3 and beyond. Each card gains levels the more you use it, and naturally this is the easiest card to score, so it went up quite quickly. However, rather crazily, each card level multiplies your score. Keep this in mind now, as the initial score is generated by the adding together the sum on the dice numbers you rolled and used. At around this time the game let me buy a percentile die (a d10 going 00, 10, … 90), as well as some of those d20s, plus there was a ‘first hand played’ modifier giving x2 score, AND the levels still only required a score of about 600 to win. You can see how this was getting… out of hand.
To further illustrate the point, one level (the final, supposedly more difficult one for the area) had the special circumstance of changing all my cards to give the same ‘base number of points’. This card point number is added to the sum of the dice before multiplication. However, for some some reason, it was set to 40, whereas up to this point most cards typically gave around 25, and this just totally trivialised the encounter.
Eventually, after beating the fourth area without needing to reroll on a single level (let alone needing to use more than my now-a-x4-multiplier ‘any combination of dice’ card), the game bugged out on the button where you progress back to the main map. It had done this before, but that time I had managed to get it to work – this time it wasn’t budging, even after restarting the game. I could have tried with a controller, but by then I didn’t have it in me to have to get up and find one just to maybe continue.
The gameplay hadn’t had enough variety in it up to that point even before I obtained that busted build, with the different challenges and effects in the levels not changing much at all, such as each round modifying a random card (which was okay but too random and out-of-the-way), or the final round of a level initiating a different negative effect which I don’t think I ever got around to seeing. Different areas that you choose from also supposedly had different ‘risk’ categories, but you have to go through each one anyway, and I did not notice a difference in challenge, with the ‘high risk’ area in fact coinciding with the beginning of my steamroll build.
What did have variety in Bonereader was the aesthetics, with there being a decent dose of juice in some of the special effects, though even these felt only semi-polished compared to the game’s cousins in the deckbuilder genre. In particular, the rolling of dice was barely animated, and considering it’s the main part of the game, it could have had a bit more to it. Some of the music tracks were bops, and although their sound didn’t perfectly match the game’s dark western tone, they made my experience slightly more fun.
The other biggest sticking points with Bonereader for me, beside the gameplay, were the art and writing. I thought the writing was very wishy-washy and hard to parse. It consists of dialogue with the characters you do battle with, but their lines boil down to many lengthy, fluffy, edgy ramblings, mainly about death, but never really saying much. It merely made me want to throw my knuckle(bone)s at them, which fortunately you can always do with one of the dialogue choices that skips straight to the duel (though I did still try to indulge most of the dialogue).
Meanwhile the art direction was a mix. It was consistent and carried the interesting Western and occult tone of the game. Some of the backgrounds/character portraits were striking (such as the giant insect enemy) while other parts felt weird and even made me anxious that there was AI involved (the first introductory character and a later one with branches for legs, as well as many of the icons). However, I am inclined to doubt it, considering its originality and weirdness, as well as having seen the developers’ previous games and a Steam post saying:
Both Daria (artist) and I have a negative attitude toward AI art. Not fanatically, though. We just agree that AI slop almost always looks bad and talentless. And almost always you can tell.
I would rather chalk it down to just being a strange artstyle and retain my faith in humanity. It’s a hefty and potentially hurtful accusation that I do not wish to throw out lightly, but I needed to mention this, as whether I like it or not it did influence my experience with the game somewhat. It’s the times we live in I suppose, dwelling on brushstrokes and wondering why the artist drew it that way, which just makes me feel a bit sad and guilty for thinking about it. Though it does make me wonder if there will develop an anti-AI artstyle or art movement, perhaps even subconsciously, that stands out more as being explicitly human-made in some way – but that’s a subject beyond this review.
Conclusion
My overall rating of Bonereader is removed from that minor anxiety, however. I think the gameplay does have strong potential but would need to be added to in some way, not only fixing the numerical balance issues but altering some of the mechanics to feel like they have more impact or change up the gameplay more, such as the per-round card effects, the items, and having a bit more dice or card variety. Essentially, it could have spent more time in the experimentation oven. The audiovisual wrapping also could have been just a bit more coherent to get that occult Western vibe right, which conceptually I found cool and definitely has potential. As it stands, though, this game is an interesting arrangement of bones – unfortunately, they just don’t have enough meat on them.
