Playing Betrayal at Club Low is joyful and off-kilter, like eating an ice cream sundae on a swing at one in the morning. Or...perhaps trying to infiltrate a nightclub while disguised as a pizzaiolo? The latter encapsulates the plot of BCL, a game whose sole developer, Cosmo D, sets in the same city as his other games: Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite, and Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1. The choice is an important one, lending a lived-in quality to BCL’s completely zany premise that helps meld an unexpectedly thoughtful vibe with what otherwise could be seen as another meme game you play for ten minutes, for a laugh and nothing more. 

But BCL holds much more. It plays like a one-shot tabletop RPG complete with on-screen dice rolls, ability checks and upgrades, and branching decision trees whose consequences lead you to one of the game’s 11 (!) unique endings. While a lot of the scenarios you get yourself into as the pizza spy are written for comedy – to match the effect of the game’s gaudy 3-D graphics and sly rejection of reality – many feel actually meaningful in both the anticipation leading up to a dice roll and the content of its outcome. Giving BCL a try in the middle of my second Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough brought a massive smile to my face. The games represent two polar ends of the CRPG spectrum, showing how rolling dice with graphics can be beautiful, regardless of how complex a game’s mechanics are. 

Speaking of mechanics: BCL’s, too, abstract their nuance to the naked eye. Watching someone play the game over their shoulder, you might think that “Pizza Dice” are just a gimmick and that the only way to get into such an experience would be to put yourself in the mood for anarchic comedy a la South Park or the hamfisted anti-narrative of a game like Super Meat Boy. However, having played through BCL on varying difficulties, I can tell you that there’s a lot more strategy and drama here than meets the eye. That last part, in my mind, is the theme of the game: the wrapping of meaningful depth in something that looks, on its surface, to have none. That’s the basis of Cosmo D’s magic trick as an artist.

We’re socialized from the time we’re born to take in artifacts of life and group them with those we think are similar to abstract the pesky work of meaning and make it easier to refer to things. We do this in games all the time. When I write Rogue-Like, every avid game fan will picture nearly the same thing, and that mental image will be distinct from Souls-Likes and Search-Action games and Puzzlers, you name it. It’s the same with visual art, and all forms of creative expression for that matter. I’m no connoisseur, but even my mind spins up wildly different images when I read the words Pop Art versus ones like Baroque, Dada, and Impressionism. Each one of these phrases spawns an identifying theme within our heads that influences perception, and – with just a single glance at BCL – your mind would likely backflip into exactly the kind of thing you’d think something that looked like that would be. 

But the way Cosmo D has imbued each decision in his game with depth alongside its left-footed humor pushes back on pigeonholing notions of genre in creative expression and playing true to type. BCL shows us that all good art is playful, not necessarily even in its playfulness, but rather in how it plays with our perception of what something can be, how it can and should be seen, and why it matters at all to be interacting with it in the first place. Even the saddest and gravest art pieces play with our definitions of grief and what it means to witness trauma. Even the most abstract play at the margin of reality and dissolution. And, in BCL, you can bamboozle your way into _play_ing iconic pink-haired DJ Chad Blueprint’s electronic mix up on the turntable in front of your adoring friends in the name of clandestine justice. It’s all one and the same.

Rubbing your chin in thought, experiencing gut-wrenching tension, and the warm embrace of a solid laugh don’t have to be at odds in art. In fact, they shouldn’t be. The best artifacts of culture elicit these reactions and a bucketful more. Go ahead and play Betrayal at Club Low. You’ll see.