Roll + Heart

[got_quiet]

Name: Roll + Heart
Status: Complete
Site: https://owl-sanctuary-studios.itch.io/rollplusheart
Pairing: Any/M Any/F
Description: Meet some LIs around the DnD table



Roll + Heart is another game about playing tabletop while also dating your fellow players (or GM). It's longer and more involved than Dungeons and Lesbians, the other tabletop VN that I've played in the BLM bundle, with longer and more numerous scenes, a combat system, and a few mini games.

 

The LIs in this game are a nice selection of interesting people. There is range both in personality, body type, and age. Age range is something that isn't so common in VNs, since most of the times your options are firmly within the young adult range or even younger, unless you're playing a game specifically about seinen or something. In this game one of the LIs is a middle aged mother of two, a very uncommon type of character to end up as a target for romance. Her story revolves somewhat around her supporting her kid at soccer. There's a few LIs with secrets, and some who are more straightforward with the meetcutes. There's also a mix of men and women.

You have some options with how to customize your MC, but they are limited, as they usually are in VNs. There are no cut scenes, so the art asset demands aren't as high, at least. Even with a number of options, including 6 different body types, your choice of body type is extremely narrow. You can be either an androgynous masc-ish person or a variety of feminine looking people. The game never asks for your gender, so the presentation you manage with the paper doll options are all you get. Trying to look male and kinda failing wasn't exactly the way I like to start my VNs, but it is what it is.

The plot is divided between the tabletop game, which is mostly on rails but lets you make some decisions that will give you points with different LIs, and dates that you can go on in between sessions. The speed at which your hangouts become romantic depend on the the characters, but I'm pretty sure all of them end up that way if you've managed to pursue them to the end. In order to go on a date, you just need to call them up, not fail the text conversation, and voila, date. You can (kinda sorta) go on a date with each person one after another during each intermission, but it appears that at a certain point you lock into one LI's final scene and after that you simply can't talk to anyone who is too far along the route to prevent hitting their final romance scenes. For this reason it makes sense to just concentrate on one LI during each run, as you don't seem to get anything by going down the line and doing everyone each time, even though the game allows you to do it.

As far as I can tell, it isn't hard to get the good end for LIs. I'm not sure there' bad ends for them, actually. Your choices are obvious bad/good options in many instances. Picking an option an LI likes gets you a lot of happy faces on the screen (and presumably kindness coins) and stuff they don't like will show you frowns, so the feedback on your decisions are relatively transparent. My first run I ended up locked into the route of an LI I wasn't even going for, and my second I had a good end for a guy who I pissed off so much he literally said he didn't want to hang out with me anymore, so the pathing seems to be extremely forgiving.


 

It's probably good that's the case because the game is kind of a buggy mess. Putting the pathing aside for a moment, Roll+Heart was made in unity, so all of the baked-in VN functionality of a RenPy game is not there. There are five save slots and you have to pick one when you start the run. From then on the game autosaves to that slot, and there is very minimal scumming. There is also no backtracking, or reading text history. So if for example you find yourself at high fondness with multiple characters, this does you no good because you can't go to the point of divergence to finish each route. You always have to start again from the beginning. Beyond that design issue, the UI is glossy but has functionality issues. Hitting escape doesn't bring up the menu. It forwards the text (and you can't go back and see what you missed when you inevitably make this mistake). There are confirmation buttons you never have to hit.  Only my controller seemed to be able to fast skip text but only my mouse could click on some special continue boxes. A few times my game froze on me and only restarting at the autosave brought it back. During one scene the character sprites would only flash on the screen and not remain. One time a sprite got duplicated in a scene and its double just stood there frozen as everything else changed around it. If you don't have a controller it seems you just have to spam click on later runs to get through the dialog quickly, but you can only do that while your mouse is in the text area, and that's also where the dialog options show up sometimes, so it's easy to accidentally choose an option and then be kinda fucked because there's no backup and no save scumming. And so on and so forth. Also, about half of the sentences don't end in a period. Not all of them. Just about half. That drove me nuts.


Here I have the option to select between two of the exact same skills. If I click on the square next to my stat the game will break and I will end up with -1 stats to distribute.
 

The minigames that appear during certain dates  are rudimentary and pretty janky. They don't add anything to the game really. The battles during the campaign are likewise unnecessary and mechanically a struggle to deal with. The game starts off with an explanation for how to deal with combat during the tabletop scenes, but then nothing that was described actually happens. You don't know what a character can do before you can move it, and you don't know how to target anything because the UI is very poor with giving feedback. It took me two combat events to figure out generally what series of clicks got me what I wanted, and this was after accidentally healing or attacking the wrong things just cause I would click on one thing, not understand why nothing happened, click on something else to see what would happen, and then trigger the action.

Luckily, the game lets you just bypass all combat in the options, and since there is not actual plot happening in the combat, it can all be safely skipped,  which is what I did half way into my first run.

Now, all of these things would generally be tolerable. It adds unnecessary frustration, but the writing for the game is ok, and the LIs are appealing. The problem is that these technical issues aren't just with the UI or mechanics. The problems also happen with the pathing and the script. In my first run by some strange reason I had scenes show up in the wrong order. That is, characters showed up to tabletop referencing dates that hadn't happened yet. The scene before I had been unable to go on a date with anyone, which I thought was weird, so when everyone came up to me talking about how they had had a fun time, I thought I had been locked out of something and the game had failed to track that. But then, the scene after that suddenly I could go on all of the dates that had been previously referenced. This sort of thing is an immersion ruining error, and is a lot harder to brush off than just stuff like leveling up bringing your stats down instead of up when you click the button that clearly looks like what you need to click to bring a stat up (which is also something that happens almost every single time you level up. It's ridiculous.)

 

If you strip down all the extra mini games and simple combat system, what you reveal is a basic VN with poor pathing, that fails to make references to choices from scene to scene. Even though I liked the characters in this game, I can't say the story is well done because there are just too many errors in the scripting. If the fundamental question of what did or didn't happen in a certain run is something a game can't keep track of, I don't think I can call it a good game.

That said, I did play Roll+Heart through three times because I actually did want to romance some of the LIs, which is more than I can say for many VNs. Even though it's fucked up by the coding, the pacing of the game doesn't drag, and the LIs have fun personalities and are nice to get to know. It's a shame that the execution of everything is so sloppy. I'm not a Renpy evangelist, but games like this make me wish people would just use something that works and leave the gimmicks alone if they can't execute well.