OneShot review

I had this game on my radar for a while. I saw it recommended a lot in some parts of the internet, and found idea of a heavily 4th wall breaking game appealing (but was yet to find one where I liked both the genre and the story). It took some tinkering with computers and reminders from others, but here we are, in my review of OneShot.

The gist

A cat-like child, Niko (who insists on not being a cat) wakes up in a strange dark house. Eventually, the kid makes it out of there, and finds a… lightbulb? A robot turns up and explains that this is the sun. And that Niko is the messiah. And that you are a god. What follows is a funny, well-made adventure about saving a dying world. The music is great, the art style is charming. And you get to go into your PC’s documents, yay!

What I liked

The presentation was nice. Sure, it’s RPG Maker XP, so janky movement and low resolution ahoy. But just like many other titles made with the engine (SigCorp series, anyone?) it compensates for this with great music and pixel art. There is a lot of style / “species” clashing (bird people and humans with TVs for a head?!), but it felt intentional and weirdly fitting. In a “soft worldbuilding” kind of way, it made the world feel more alive. The characters you encounter are cool, that’s most I am willing to say to not spoil.

The 4th wall breaking is obviously the signature thing, and it was neat. Especially once you get to Solstice, the second part of the story. I can’t deny, I hoped for more sophisticated puzzles, but this isn’t an InfoSec CTF contest, is it?

What I disliked

Practically all of my gripes with the game are technical. I am a Linux user, and although I don’t expect dedicated support for a relatively niche platform, it was nonetheless annoying to run a virtual machine with Windows just to play a game. Especially since there was support for common distributions previously, and I run plain and simple Fedora. Urgh! Kind of fits thematically, I guess.

There was also lots of techno babble related to programming. It got tiring for me towards the end, especially since it’s central to game’s premise. But as a fan of To the Moon and Talos Principle I just accepted games don’t need to have realistic depiction of computers or science to be enjoyable. Plus, I don’t think those who aren’t in a CS-related field will really notice or have an issue with this.

Also #2, at times it was a bit confusing to figure out what to do next, but that was probably just me…

All in all, minor issues that an average person won’t experience!

Conclusion

Is OneShot worth your time and money? Well, it’s dirt-cheap on Steam sales and around 4 hours to complete. You’ll experience a nice, cozy-ish (end of the) world and do a lot more that I can’t mention due to fear of spoilers. So… unless you’re like a fire fighter or penniless, the answer is probably yes.