The reasons why a game goes viral tend to be a mystery. Why one game gains traction and another doesn’t, attracting the attention of a lot of people, is something that is rarely possible to know for sure. What is clear is that it helps if the game is good. The more interesting elements it has, the easier it will be for it to reach that virality. And the latest viral game, Buckshot Roulette, is very good.
Buckshot Roulette is a game that puts us in a very simple, but dangerous situation: we are in the bathrooms of a nightclub. On the other side of the hallway, a sinister-looking man is waiting for us to play three rounds of Russian roulette, but with a shotgun instead of a revolver. When it’s our turn, we can shoot him or ourselves. Each round, we randomly draw two objects from a box, which we can use however we want, as long as it’s our turn. There are no jumpscares. The rest is up to us.
This game by Mike Klubnika, in addition to strongly reminding one of the great successes of 2022, Inscryption, manages to succeed because of how rough and industrial it is. The music is abrasive, the sound effects brutal, and the artistic design sinister. There is not a single time that shooting or being shot at doesn’t feel tense and terrible. And when we shoot ourselves in the face, there is not a single time that it doesn’t scare and result in trauma.
This is contributed by how well designed all aspects of the game are. Each new round increases the stakes, introduces new elements to consider, and makes it more likely that everything will end with our brains on the wall. The objects, far from relieving tension by giving us some control over what will happen, add tension by being limited, random, and also in the possession of our opponent. This, combined with the fact that the final round is life or death, without defibrillators to bring us back to life after the last shot, makes Buckshot Roulette a brief but very intense game.
That’s why it shouldn’t surprise us that it has gone viral. It is a dark, tense, and dramatic game. It produces scares without jumpscares, fear without resorting to the classic elements of the genre. And besides, it costs €1.20 on itch.io. More than enough reasons to try this small, but immeasurable horror game.
