The latest indie hit on Steam sees you play Russian roulette with a 12-gauge shotgun

Buckshot Roulette has made the jump from itch.io to Steam, and it seems like it's hitting the mark for a lot of players as it quickly gained an Overwhelmingly Positive rating. Note: personal purchase.

What is it? A tabletop horror game that attempts to re-design the infamous game of Russian Roulette, replacing the traditional revolver with a proper 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. In terms of style it looks a little like a more explosive Inscryption. It would be a little boring if it was an instant-kill type of thing though, which it isn't, instead it's based on a number of rounds and you have specific health points you need to take down too.

You take it in turns to shoot (obviously), after the dealer inserts a mixture of live and blank shells into the shotgun in a random order. The game gradually evolves too, with items that let you do things like handcuffs to have the dealer skip a go, a hand saw to deal double damage and so on.

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The Steam release is quite a big expansion for the game too including:

• New items for Double or Nothing mode: More useful tools for you, but also more useful tools for The Dealer. We hope to see you put them to good use.
• Leaderboards: Let the whole wide world see how big of a gambler you really are.
• Additional language support: The language of a shotgun blast is universal, but for everything else it is not.
• Controller support: You won’t need aim assist anyway.
• Steam Deck support (beta): Now you don’t even need to be next to your computer for that one more run.
• Original Soundtrack is included in the Steam version, feel free to blast it in your rusty nightclub if you have one
• Improved The Dealer’s AI in Double or Nothing mode. You gotta work hard for those millions, so don’t expect any mercy.

Quite a disturbing game of course but clever at the same time and with the tiny asking price (£2.49), it's easy to see why it's doing so well. Much like a lot of other recent smaller games, I can see this taking up quite a lot of my time. And — oh look, it's also another hit made with the free and open source cross-platform Godot Engine. It has Native Linux support too and in my gameplay time, it worked without issues.

It's set to keep expanding by the looks of it, with the developer mentioning a multiplayer mode is being worked on. Now that would be very interesting to see.

Available to buy from:

Steam

itch.io