Cosmo D’s latest game Moves of the Diamond Hand is a direct sequel to Betrayal at Club Low, and while it’s still in early access with a developing road map, the vibes so far are transcendent. The story orbits around a big juicy mayoral election, which unfolds across the city as the player attempts to fulfil their own inscrutable goal of joining the enigmatic Circus X; I’m still playing a pizzaiolo, this time with an expanded range of talents (I can busk and do laundry and sew) and a bunch more dice systems to work with. Circus X is seemingly run by Murial, the handler from the previous Off-Peak games, and it’s not explicitly clear whether this establishment has anything to do with The Circus spy agency, which was your previous employer from Club Low days. The first two chapters are out now, but it’ll be a hot minute (probably in the later half of this year) until we see how everything plays out.
When I wrote about Betrayal at Club Low in 2022, I was moved by how instantly it brought me back to the easy highs of my 20s – bar-hopping and clubbing and all the nocturnal shenanigans that come with being young and dumb in a big city. At one point I lived in a roach-ridden little apartment in Brooklyn, worked a night job that had pizza Fridays, and barely saw daylight; I would be lying if I said these were the best years of my life, but despite all the miseries, self-induced and otherwise, I mostly look back on this period with hard-won, serene acceptance. In 2026, Cosmo D has once again sucked me back into the sunless, hustle-heavy microcosm of not-New York, albeit with less angst, more favorable cash terms, and nowhere for my character to go but up (literally, though, because we start out stuck in a subway station).
This is by far the biggest Cosmo D game, with a lot more space to explore. And it isn’t just a city, but a big city on the precipice of big change, though one could argue that these kind of cities are, down to the second, constantly in flux. The election candidates and their respective platforms are everywhere – on campaign posters and flyers, on book covers, on the lips of everyone you meet. Diamond Hand is a game that wants you to decide what’s important to you, and what you’re willing to do to get it, while reinforcing these drives through a sense of place. To this end, there are little messages hidden around the city that force your eyeballs up against questions like what is this place to you? Or the equally navel-gazey: who are you to this place?
The answer is “complicated” if we’re talking about my New York baggage, and mind-numbingly simple if we’re talking about my experience of Diamond Hand. This is a place that does an exquisite job at prodding at the most ridiculous and capital-r Romantic feelings I’ve had New York, even when the city was stabbing me in the guts and running off with my last molecule of sanity, and I will roam Cosmo D’s streets and haunt the laundromat and skulk around the library like the most bamboozled starry-eyed idiot in the world. There’s a fierce joy in how I survive here – performing as a stand-in for a famous street artist, harvesting plants with music, cooking pizzas – and like Club Low, I reach an unreal flow state when I’m locked in during these sequences. The dice are speaking in tongues, and my pizzaiolo is vibrating on a hitherto-unknown chaos frequency that none of us would survive in reality.
With the election drawing close, the city is imbued with nervous excitement, a sort of ambient twitchy-leg energy that seeps into the environment like a drug. I am purposefully dragging my feet on deciding how I want to shape the way I interact with this place – so far, I’ve been focusing hard on my Cooking stat, but that isn’t going to cut it. The game wants me to choose. Each of the three candidates offer different stat perks if you back them – Mike Broonan, for instance (who I’ve dubbed Fuckboy Gale of Waterdeep because just look at him), is an ex-boy band member who is serious about the importance of Physique, while someone like Sonny Koln talks a big game about arts funding that will surely help Music.
By dangling these explicit stat boosts in front of me, the game knows what it’s doing – it’s ruining the chances of me voting solely on the basis of my admittedly skewed values. I am clamped in a vise of my own material self-interest, in a world built on unpredictable, surreal versions of New York, where my existence is tethered to dice that have a mind of their own. I am greedy and paranoid and ambitious. I want to have my cake and eat it, and I want to eat it here, in the square between the man selling bootleg library cards and the roving pizza oven guy. So, who am I, and what is this place to me? For now, I’m fortune incarnate, in both a heaven and hell of my own making, and I’m not leaving until it’s over.
