Called shot.
About half a year ago, I said that Mike Klubnika was a developer to watch out for, and I was right. When you openly announce that somebody somewhere is going to make something big someday, the inevitable question becomes when exactly that someday is going to be. It's not often that it's within the year. Buckshot Roulette is as simple and as short as it is sweet; a gameplay loop so tight and an aesthetic so masterfully constructed that the only holes that can be poked in it are little more than petty gripes.
Maybe I'm starting to get soft in my old age, but I didn't expect the act of sticking a low-poly shotgun in my face in a video game to make me shrink back in my chair. It's because of something rotten in the atmosphere. Where a more amateur project would set this in any indistinct, grubby basement, or dark, empty cabin somewhere — a Blair Witch Project, an Inscryption — Klubnika finds a setting more sinister in the open. The entire game takes place in a side room of a nightclub, just steps away from the thumping hardbass and the flashing lights. Rather than getting lost, slipping between the margins and winding up alone in a place where nobody could ever find you, you could return to civilization in a couple of strides. Yet the player sticks around, and for what? For money? It's not for much money. Sixty grand. Is that enough to stake your life on? The harrowing thought is that it is. Three years of rent, a down payment on a house, twelve straight months where you wouldn't have to concern yourself with working. I'm sure we've all had a conversation where someone proposes an idea that you'd do something dangerous or embarrassing for a certain amount of money, and asks you to set a dollar amount; how much for you to streak through the middle of this field, how much for you to jump off of that ledge, how much for you to reach for that cop's gun? Have you ever settled on sixty grand? Have you ever been desperate enough that you'd put your life on the line for less?
Buckshot Roulette adheres closely to an old piece of writing advice I once heard, which was to take something that everyone knows and add just enough of a twist that people wonder how they never thought of it themselves. When I heard "Russian Roulette but with a pump-action shotgun", I thought the idea was kind of stupid. You can't exactly "miss" a shell in a barrel the way that you can miss a round in a revolver cylinder. The game clears it up immediately by filling the shotgun with an assortment of live shells and blanks — Klubnika means "dummies", but he ain't know it — and yeah, duh. Of course that's how you would do it. The concept alone is brought to full effect with the introduction of the items, which allow you to saw the barrel off for extra damage, cycle a shell to waste it and narrow the odds, or outright peek at what's chambered to see if the next shot will go click or if it'll go boom. The dealer eventually stops announcing the amount of live rounds and dummies that are going into the shotgun, forcing you to very suddenly start counting them up before he has the chance to load them all in. There are a lot of neat little turns here, and the game feels remarkably well-realized. I'm not sure how you could do this much better.
The earliest part of the game is a little too heavy on the randomness for my taste, and that's something of an inherent issue. Your initial set of actions may as well just be pulling the arm of a slot machine; you either get lucky from the jump and you win, or you get unlucky from the jump and you lose. It's realistic in the context of taking turns firing a gun into the roof of your mouth, I suppose, but it doesn’t make for an especially engaging gameplay loop. Digging through the item box and pulling out a bloodied contract signed by God is also incredibly corny. Mike, you’re already doing Inscryption better than Daniel Mullins did. Don’t spoil your own good work by bringing over his awful writing.
Still, though, I’ve thought for a while that the titles found in compilations like the Dread X Collections are going to be the way forward for indie horror, and I think this helps to prove that point. Bite-sized projects that you can start and finish in a single sitting with strong atmospheres and interesting twists on what we’re already familiar with are what more developers need to be striving towards. Klubnika continues to impress. If he keeps going at the rate he’s been going, I think he’s got it in him to go down as one of the greatest to ever do it. It’s exciting to see a developer with this much potential who continues to realize it more and more with every passing release. Mark me down as a fan. I want to be here for the long haul.
I’m glad the club has access to a defibrillator that can revive someone who’s taken four shells to the head.
About half a year ago, I said that Mike Klubnika was a developer to watch out for, and I was right. When you openly announce that somebody somewhere is going to make something big someday, the inevitable question becomes when exactly that someday is going to be. It's not often that it's within the year. Buckshot Roulette is as simple and as short as it is sweet; a gameplay loop so tight and an aesthetic so masterfully constructed that the only holes that can be poked in it are little more than petty gripes.
Maybe I'm starting to get soft in my old age, but I didn't expect the act of sticking a low-poly shotgun in my face in a video game to make me shrink back in my chair. It's because of something rotten in the atmosphere. Where a more amateur project would set this in any indistinct, grubby basement, or dark, empty cabin somewhere — a Blair Witch Project, an Inscryption — Klubnika finds a setting more sinister in the open. The entire game takes place in a side room of a nightclub, just steps away from the thumping hardbass and the flashing lights. Rather than getting lost, slipping between the margins and winding up alone in a place where nobody could ever find you, you could return to civilization in a couple of strides. Yet the player sticks around, and for what? For money? It's not for much money. Sixty grand. Is that enough to stake your life on? The harrowing thought is that it is. Three years of rent, a down payment on a house, twelve straight months where you wouldn't have to concern yourself with working. I'm sure we've all had a conversation where someone proposes an idea that you'd do something dangerous or embarrassing for a certain amount of money, and asks you to set a dollar amount; how much for you to streak through the middle of this field, how much for you to jump off of that ledge, how much for you to reach for that cop's gun? Have you ever settled on sixty grand? Have you ever been desperate enough that you'd put your life on the line for less?
Buckshot Roulette adheres closely to an old piece of writing advice I once heard, which was to take something that everyone knows and add just enough of a twist that people wonder how they never thought of it themselves. When I heard "Russian Roulette but with a pump-action shotgun", I thought the idea was kind of stupid. You can't exactly "miss" a shell in a barrel the way that you can miss a round in a revolver cylinder. The game clears it up immediately by filling the shotgun with an assortment of live shells and blanks — Klubnika means "dummies", but he ain't know it — and yeah, duh. Of course that's how you would do it. The concept alone is brought to full effect with the introduction of the items, which allow you to saw the barrel off for extra damage, cycle a shell to waste it and narrow the odds, or outright peek at what's chambered to see if the next shot will go click or if it'll go boom. The dealer eventually stops announcing the amount of live rounds and dummies that are going into the shotgun, forcing you to very suddenly start counting them up before he has the chance to load them all in. There are a lot of neat little turns here, and the game feels remarkably well-realized. I'm not sure how you could do this much better.
The earliest part of the game is a little too heavy on the randomness for my taste, and that's something of an inherent issue. Your initial set of actions may as well just be pulling the arm of a slot machine; you either get lucky from the jump and you win, or you get unlucky from the jump and you lose. It's realistic in the context of taking turns firing a gun into the roof of your mouth, I suppose, but it doesn’t make for an especially engaging gameplay loop. Digging through the item box and pulling out a bloodied contract signed by God is also incredibly corny. Mike, you’re already doing Inscryption better than Daniel Mullins did. Don’t spoil your own good work by bringing over his awful writing.
Still, though, I’ve thought for a while that the titles found in compilations like the Dread X Collections are going to be the way forward for indie horror, and I think this helps to prove that point. Bite-sized projects that you can start and finish in a single sitting with strong atmospheres and interesting twists on what we’re already familiar with are what more developers need to be striving towards. Klubnika continues to impress. If he keeps going at the rate he’s been going, I think he’s got it in him to go down as one of the greatest to ever do it. It’s exciting to see a developer with this much potential who continues to realize it more and more with every passing release. Mark me down as a fan. I want to be here for the long haul.
I’m glad the club has access to a defibrillator that can revive someone who’s taken four shells to the head.