Every once in a while comes a game that will considerably change your life in a very short amount of time. The previous generations had Russian Roulette, ours has something called Buckshot Roulette. I have only tried one of those, so my assertion is highly biased, but I find Buckshot Roulette to be the superior pick of the two.
Buckshot Roulette uses the overall concept of Russian Roulette but replaces the puny revolver with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. The result is naturally much messier, but that’s not the only difference. It’s also both a horror and a tabletop experience.
How does Buckshot Roulette play?
Interestingly, this isn’t an action game. BR is a tabletop game where you enter the dingiest nightclub ever, see the gun getting loaded with a certain number of rounds in an unknown order, and hope for the best as you face off against the dealer. It’s not as simple as just a game of randomly taking turns, but, as with all things horror, it’s all best left unspoiled. Buckshot Roulette is rather original — as a video game, at least — but, if I’m to compare it to anything else out there, I’d go with saying it’s sure to please fans of Inscryption.
A full playthrough will likely not take you more than 20 minutes — yes, even if you don’t blow yourself up.
It plays just like a real tabletop game would, down to it featuring pretty much no interface clutter. All the information that you get, you get from the game.
The devs also assure players that even though the results of the game are unpredictable due to the random factor involved, the AI doesn’t know more than it should. The dealer is a very unsettling creature, but it plays fair.
Even though this is an indie game through and through, developer Mark Klubnika warns that you must own what they call a “relatively modern” dedicated graphics card that features Vulkan support.
What are the items in Buckshot Roulette?
Here are all of the items in Buckshot Roulette:
| Handcuffs | Causes the dealer to skip his next turn |
| Hand Saw | Doubles the damage of your shotgun. Great combo with the Magnifying glass |
| Beer | Ejects the shell that’s in the chamber |
| Pills | Begins a subgame of “double or nothing”* |
| Cigarettes | heals one life point |
| Magnifying Glass | Allows you to examine the shell currently in the chamber |
If you take the pills, you’ll begin a game of double or nothing, which will introduce a new set of items. Let’s look into those:
Double Or Nothing items
| Inverter | Reverses the effect of the shell currently in the chamber. A blank will turn into a live round and a live round turns into a blank. |
| Adrenaline | The player will steal an item from the dealer’s board and use it immediately |
| Burner phone | Will inform you about a random round in your stack |
| Expired medicine | 40% chance of regaining two lives, 60% chance of losing one life |
You can get Buckshot Roulette for $2.99 on Steam, or you can get it from itch.io for $1.20 right here.
