Vidjama Gmaes Work

It’s a diamond in the grave.

Diamond in the Grave is a $5 game I found on Itch.io. Okay I didn’t find it, I follow the developer on Twitter. It’s a relatively short game that is a spinoff of Prototype N, another game that is probably coming out sometime in the next decade. You can play the demo for Prototype N right now. It’s pretty good.

I won’t make any grandiose statements about how Diamond in the Grave is the best game you’ll play all year. It’s like the snickerdoodles that you coworker brings into the office. You’ve had one a million times before and this isn’t going to particularly blow you away, but it is a good way to spend a few hours and you know it’s baked fresh and without any crap that you’d get in a Little Debbie snack cake.

Diamond in the Grave has six levels plus a boss battle at the end, and if you blow through it might take you about a half hour to complete. The longevity in the game comes from the two challenges associated with each level; score and computers. Each level (except two) has three disks you can find that probably add to your score and I have no idea what else because I haven’t found them all and probably never will. Your score at the end of each level is tallied and if you beat the par score for the level, well it tells you you beat the par score.

The character sprites are very well done and the controls are both tight and responsive. You can spend points on weapons but given how plentiful they are in the levels I never felt the need to. I wish the game worked with my Xbox controller but alas it does not. It does have some neat level gimmicks like big dice blocks that count down every time you step on them and there’s another stage that turns the game suddenly and momentarily into a bit of a bullet hell. I died most on the dice level.

Check it out.