Back when I wrote about CloverPit, a bunch of readers said “Oh, this is just Buckshot Roulette,” a game I hadn’t heard of. Over the weekend, while piling my Steam library with games I was excited to play once I stopped building a new website, I tossed Buckshot Roulette in there. I finally got the chance to play a bit, and yeah, it definitely presses some of those same dark, complicated brain buttons as CloverPit.
Buckshot Roulette is a 2023 Itch.io game that came to Steam in 2024. In single-player mode, you’re sat across from a dealer in a grimy room. The dealer loads a variety of live or blank shotgun shells into a gun, and you take turns passing it back and forth deciding whether to shoot yourself or your opponent. Shooting yourself with a blank gives you another turn; shooting the other person (or shooting yourself) takes a point off health. The game progresses over rounds, with your health refilling in the first two before the third goes into “sudden death;” if you die here, you lose and start over.
You get items before some rounds, which can help you craft whatever passes for a strategy in this game. The magnifying glass will tell you whether a live or blank is in the chamber, the handcuffs force your opponent to skip a turn, and the knife increases the gun’s damage. Your opponent, of course, also gets items, and in my single-player games I’ve found there to be a wonderful sense of dread as I watch the dealer busy themselves with theirs, knowing something bad is about to happen to me but being unable to stop it.
Beating single-player for the first time unlocks an endless mode, and there’s also a multiplayer mode that I haven’t been able to check out yet but have enjoyed watching YouTube videos of. Playing the game with friends seems like a fun/terrible social experience, where playing solo has, like CloverPit, exposed all the grossest wiring of my brain when it comes to the appeal of gambling and chance.
Both games lay bare the fantasy of making your own luck and precisely where strategy lies when it comes to gambling. They both have strategy; I’d posit Buckshot Roulette’s is a bit easier to employ than CloverPit, given your more limited options and the math that undergirds it. But at the end of the day, you’re still at the mercy of chance in both games–and in both games, I am absolutely certain that I can be totally in control, that I’m on a streak or that the odds hate me, that everything is laden with meaning and portents and that way more is going on than just me sitting alone in whatever dismal virtual room clicking buttons.
Both games’ aesthetics seem to want to highlight how gross this all is, with their jagged art styles and abrasive music. But at the same time, they fully indulge in the thing they’re criticizing. Playing them both, I ask myself if I’m really playing them ironically or from a distance, if I’m engaging in some kind of intellectual exercise or just mashing the same buttons that led to loot box regulation or dunks on sports betting. And given that neither game is actually gambling, does that make it better–can you have the pleasure without the pain?--or does that make it worse–with none of the consequences of real gambling to stop me, am I just training neural pathways that could lead me down those roads?
Neither CloverPit or Buckshot Roulette necessarily want to answer those questions, putting themselves out there for you to wrestle with. They’re interesting experiments, finding me at a time where other developers are playing with similar ideas of how we engage with randomness and what it does to our heads. They’re also both really fun, even if what that fun is unsettles me if I look at it too closely. I'm impressed that such a little game has so much going on, that it lets me bring so much of myself to it. Thanks for the moral crisis, readers.
