Should You Play One Shot?

One Shot is a tiny indie game that I only even heard of because I randomly watched the below video covering a selection of small games made in RPG Maker.

As far as small indie games go I’m quite glad that I gave this a shot, especially considering that it was only a few bucks on Steam and also available on platforms like the Nintendo Switch.

We’ll get started with the trailer for the game:

The Story

The story is definitely the strongest part of One Shot so I’m going to be doing my best to not spoil anything here.

You play as a little cat person called Niko who wakes up in a dark room. You look around, solve some puzzles and get transported to a dying world with no sun.

You’re told that you’re the messiah of this world and your job is to take a special light bulb to the top of a tower and once there that’ll become the new world’s sun.

But you soon find out that’s not going to be enough to save this dying world and the plot expands out from there.

Where this game really succeeds though is by breaking the forth wall and getting you the player involved but that’s easily the best part of the story so I don’t want to explain anything else.

The Gameplay

In general the gameplay is pretty basic. There’s no combat so you just walk around, talk to NPCs, explore, find items and solve puzzles.

The puzzles for the most part are basic sort of find this item, combine it with this other item and use it here sort of things.

But like I mentioned in the story section the game does break the forth wall in some interesting ways. At the beginning the game suggests that you play in windowed mode, not full screen. I wasn’t sure about that at first but it turns out that’s absolutely necessary.

I don’t want to go into too much detail but there are puzzles that involve manipulating that window and even doing things on your computer itself.

If you’ve ever played games like Undertale or Doki Doki Literature Club then you might have kind of an idea what to expect here.

So overall the gameplay isn’t too amazing but the forth wall breaking stuff is pretty cool and had I played this game a long time ago before playing other games that do kind of similar things it would have blown me away.

Sound and Music

The music is great and fits the atmosphere and tone of the game perfectly although there aren’t too many tracks.

Sound effect-wise there’s not a huge amount here either, mainly just footsteps as you walk over different kinds of terrain. But like I said there isn’t any combat so you don’t actually need a huge amount of different sound effects.

What is there though is not bad.

There’s no voice acting either but for this kind of game that’s completely fine.

Graphics

This is a very simple over the top 2D game made in RPG Maker so the graphics aren’t amazing.

The pixel art is very nice though for the most part and the character sprites all look great.

There’s some nice illustrations and pixel art scenes to scattered throughout the game as well.

In Conclusion

I quite enjoyed the experience of playing One Shot. It’s short and only took me about 5 hours to complete the game and then go back to almost play it again for the complete ending.

It’s touching, it’s got a lot of heart and it does some interesting things with it’s gameplay and very few other games do that sort of thing.

If you’ve got a few bucks, a free weekend and this looks interesting to you at all I’d highly recommend you give it a play.

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Screenshots and artwork in this review are from the One Shot page on Steam and page on Nintendo.com used under Fair Use