Buckshot Roulette

I came into Buckshot Roulette expecting a novelty act. What I got was something that sat in the back of my head for two days after I first cleared it. The premise is a one-liner: you and a grotesque entity called The Dealer take turns pointing an eight-round pump-action shotgun at each other, or at yourselves. Live shells hurt. Blanks give you another turn. First one to zero lives loses. That's it. Except it's not quite it, and that gap between the pitch and the actual experience is where the game earns its reputation. The first round is a bare-bones tutorial in probability. You can see how many live and blank shells are loaded before the gun cycles, so the whole thing becomes a running mental calculation of odds. Shoot yourself on a likely blank, bank the extra turn, then unload on the Dealer. Simple enough. But from round two onward, both you and the Dealer get a random draw of items before each reload, and that's where the decision-making sharpens into something genuinely tense. The magnifying glass lets you peek at the chambered shell. The barrel saw doubles damage on the next shot. Handcuffs force the Dealer to skip a turn. Cigarettes heal a life. Adrenaline lets you steal an item straight out of the Dealer's hand. The inverter flips a live round to blank, or vice versa. The burner phone tips you off on a shell further down the barrel. Stack a few of these right and you can run a near-perfect turn. Get unlucky on a 50/50 with none left in hand, and the game reminds you who's actually in charge. The honest criticism is that the item system can swing both ways in ugly fashion. There are runs where the Dealer burns through a wall of items and you just die, and runs where you steamroll without much thought. The luck floor never fully disappears, and some players will bounce off that hard. The content depth is also thin on paper: the main run takes fifteen to twenty minutes, and once you've beaten it, the Double or Nothing endless mode unlocks as a score-chasing loop where you keep risking your earnings against escalating rounds until you lose everything or walk. It's legitimately the better mode for replayability, but the overall package is still a compact one. The October 2024 multiplayer update added up to four-player PVP with public and private lobbies, two new items exclusive to that mode (the Jammer and the Remote, which can reverse table turn order to burn an opponent's move), and round customization options. The multiplayer is no-frills, no chat, pure mechanics. Whether that's charming or frustrating depends on your tolerance for stripped-down netplay. Atmosphere deserves a mention even from someone who cares more about frame timing than art direction. The low-res, deep-fried visuals set inside a 1998 nightclub backroom are doing serious work. The Dealer's animations are disturbing in a way that somehow amplifies the decision pressure. Mike Klubnika built the whole thing in Godot and composed the soundtrack himself, and it shows a coherence that a lot of indie titles miss. The thumping club music bleeding through the walls while you do mental probability math at a table with a shotgun is exactly the right kind of wrong. Comparisons to Inscryption are common and fair, though Buckshot is far shorter and more mechanically focused. If you need a hundred hours of content or a deep ranked ladder, look elsewhere. If you can accept a tight twenty-minute roguelike loop with enough item interaction to make smart play feel earned, and you want something to run against friends or burn through on a lunch break, this delivers at a price that costs less than a fast food combo. The multiplayer adds legs. The solo loop is genuinely sharp while it lasts. My only real complaint is wanting more of it.

Fred · Scout Team

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