Dark Dice: Cthulhu Investigation Log Review

Every Roll Can Cost You Your Sanity, Your Team, or Your Life

Dark Dice: Cthulhu Investigation Log is a dice-driven interactive investigation log set in the Cthulhu Mythos, where reading through branching case files and choosing how to respond to them is backed by dice rolls that determine whether an investigator's sanity holds, a teammate survives, or a route even stays open. There's no undo once a die lands: a bad roll can close off entire branches of a case, and the game leans hard into that irreversibility as its core tension, framing every decision as a wager against the character's own dwindling grip on reality. Multiple difficulty levels let players tune how punishing that sanity drain feels, from an easy mode built for taking in the story at a relaxed pace to a hard mode where sanity collapses fast enough that giving up on fully solving a route and simply reaching any ending becomes the realistic goal. Accessibility options round out the presentation, including adjustable text size, custom volume controls, subtitle options, and support for playing at a self-directed pace without timed input, all backed by a save-anytime system that lets a session be picked back up mid-case rather than forcing a run to be finished in one sitting. Developed and published by Selig Interactive, Dark Dice: Cthulhu Investigation Log launched into Steam Early Access on September 8, 2026, priced at $9.99, and has already seen frequent post-launch patches addressing balance and content in the weeks since.

A Tiny, Unanimously Positive Early Access Launch

Dark Dice: Cthulhu Investigation Log has drawn just two reviews so far, both positive, for a 100% approval rating on an extremely small sample. One review is written in English by a player with several hours logged across multiple difficulty settings, and the other is a longer, more critical Simplified Chinese review from a player evaluating the game as an existing fan of Cthulhu Mythos fiction, together giving a more complete picture than either alone.

A Tense, Replayable Dice-and-Choice Loop That Rewards Multiple Playthroughs

The English-language review, written by someone new to this style of game entirely, describes initial unfamiliarity with the setting and mechanics giving way to quick understanding after one or two playthroughs, praising how the difficulty settings let a first run focus on story before later attempts crank up the sanity pressure. That reviewer specifically calls out medium and hard difficulty for getting "quite tense" as sanity drops fast enough to force giving up on certain routes just to reach any ending before running out, and comes away feeling the game offers real content and replay value for its price, explicitly recommending it as worth trying. The dice-driven irreversibility at the center of the design, no rerolling a bad outcome once it lands, is exactly what gives that tension its teeth, turning what could be a straightforward branching visual novel into something with genuine, felt stakes on higher difficulties.

A More Skeptical Read: Thin Stakes, a Truncated Story, and Not Enough Dread

The Chinese-language review, from a self-described longtime Mythos fan who played through a single scenario, pushes back hard on how much those stakes actually matter in practice. That reviewer argues the game is "a bit too clever for its own good," noting that even counting failed branches, the total amount of writing isn't large, and that failing a roll simply allows a reroll with no real lasting consequence, undercutting the promise of permanent, irreversible outcomes. The same review notes that most choices can be clicked through one after another without meaningful restriction, making the experience feel closer to a straightforward interactive novel than a true risk-driven investigation. Its sharpest criticism targets the narrative scope itself: the reviewer describes playing an investigator who arrives at a scene, confirms something serious happened, and then hands the case off to another agency to conclude the scenario, calling the story arc "extremely truncated." Existing fans of the Mythos might read that outcome with a knowing smile, but a newcomer finishing the same scenario is left confused rather than unsettled, missing the sense of cosmic, unnameable dread the setting is known for. The same reviewer does credit the localization as clearly done with care, and calls the discounted price worth supporting even with those reservations, leaving open the possibility that later scenarios go deeper than the one already played. It's worth stressing that this critique comes from someone who only played through a single scenario before hitting a session time limit, so it may say as much about the specific case picked as about the game's writing as a whole, but the underlying concern about reroll consequences and choice restriction reads as a structural point rather than a one-scenario fluke.

Verdict

Dark Dice: Cthulhu Investigation Log pairs an irreversible, sanity-draining dice mechanic with a branching Mythos investigation log, and its two early reviews agree on more than they disagree: it's tense on higher difficulties, its dice-driven stakes are a genuine hook, and it's reasonably priced for what's there. Where they split is on how much that irreversibility and dread actually land in practice, one reviewer found real tension and replay value across multiple runs, while a more skeptical, Mythos-literate reviewer found low-consequence rerolls, clickable-through choices, and a first scenario that ends just as the investigation should be getting started. As an Early Access title still being actively patched, those complaints, particularly around scenario depth and how much a failed roll truly costs, read as the most useful roadmap for where Selig Interactive should focus next. At $9.99, it's a reasonable pickup for dice-and-choice fans willing to accept Early Access rough edges, just temper expectations around how deep any single case currently goes.