Catching up with Buckshot Roulette
+ May's Best Games
My opponent and I are on our last lives. Two rounds are chambered in the shotgun between us: one blank, one live. I pick it up, aim, and fire — knowing I have equal chances at victory or annihilation.
Such are the bleak probabilities of Buckshot Roulette. Developer Mike Dublinka cites Daniel Mullins (creator of Inscryption and Pony Island) as an inspiration in the game’s credits and it shows. Like Inscryption, Buckshot Roulette drips horror through its grungy textures, crunchy polygons, and murky lighting. The game’s most sinister touch: you can aim the shotgun at your face — if you fire a blank, you get to go again. Even when I’ve deduced that blanks outnumber live shots 3 to 1, I’ve managed to kill myself this way.
But it’s not just a gamble; each round you’ll gain random single-use items, from a magnifying glass that lets you peek at the current shell to cigarettes that refill a life to adrenaline shots that steal an item from your adversary. Sometimes you’ll realize that you can combine your tools to easily blow your adversary away. More often, your knowledge can’t be perfect, and you’ll sweat between pulling the trigger and hearing the click of a blank or the blast of live fire.
Grim as it is, Buckshot Roulette kept me hooked as a train sped me towards my sister’s wedding this weekend. It feels like a successful experiment in distilling Inscryption to a 100-proof hit of pure dread and anticipation. And for $3, it’s more than worth a shot.
You can hear me on two of this week’s Here & Now Anytime episodes. I performed the voice-over for Ukrainian border guard Roman Hrybov, the soldier who intoned the much-memed cry of defiance, “Russian Warship, go f*** yourself,” in the opening days of the conflict.
I also joined host Chris Bentley to discuss some of May’s best games; Hades II Early Access, Animal Well, and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.