OneShot

he was whipping up joy in a kettle.. actual happiness. no, but if i'm being serious oneshot is one of my favorite games of all time. love the feel of the game and its characters. also niko pfp's are literally everywhere lol. (i'm guilty)

OneShot surprised me, it was not what I was expecting initially. But this game is by far a 10/10 would recommend. Yes, there will be times you get stuck, but don't let a puzzle you can't figure out lead Niko astray. After all, you're here to guide them to restore the world's lost sun! I purchased the bundle with both the original game and the world machine edition. If you are not playing on a handheld, I highly recommend playing this version (the original) first. You could probably run this game on a potato and get 144+ fps. While the graphics are simple, OneShot goes to show that a game doesn't need ultra realistic graphics, high fps, or ray tracing to be a genuinely good game. I would rather play OneShot 100 times over before picking up a AAA game that was rushed beyond all belief without QA to meet an impossible deadline.

I will forever love this game!

Spoiler warning: I talk a bit about the general tone of later parts of the game, including the Tower and Solstice. I don't really spoil what actually happens, but if you already think you want to play OneShot I would genuinely recommend just stopping here and going in knowing as little as possible. I went into OneShot almost completely blind. Pretty much all I knew was Niko, the lightbulb, that you supposedly only get "one shot", and that the game sometimes interacts with your computer. I ended up absolutely loving it. OneShot is probably one of the most unique games I've played. There really isn't much else that does what it does with fourth-wall breaking, puzzles, your actual desktop/files, and the relationship between you and the character you're controlling. A lot of games have meta stuff in them, but here it actually feels like part of the game rather than just a gimmick. Some of the best puzzles depend on it and I don't think they would be anywhere near as memorable without it. Niko is also incredibly easy to get attached to. By the end I actually cared a lot about what happened to them, and there were several points where I stopped thinking about what the "correct" thing to do in a game was and started thinking about what I actually wanted to do for Niko. The biggest surprise for me was definitely the Tower. I expected the fourth-wall stuff to mostly be clever or fun, and then the game suddenly went much further into psychological horror than I was expecting. There isn't really conventional horror like gore or jumpscares, but the isolation, what happens with Niko, and especially the way the game starts interacting with your actual computer made the whole thing genuinely unsettling. I had absolutely no idea OneShot was going to do anything like that. Solstice was incredible though, and I really don't think the game is complete without it. Calling it optional postgame content makes it sound way less important than it actually is. It gives context and resolution to so much of the original game and made me understand a lot of things completely differently. There are darker things that happen in Solstice, but weirdly I found it nowhere near as disturbing as the Tower. It feels much more like an actual journey where you're working together with other characters towards something. And I really want to emphasize the going-in-blind part. It didn't just make the game a little better for me, I think it made the experience fundamentally different. A huge part of what made OneShot work was that I genuinely didn't know what the game was capable of doing or where it was going. If I already knew about the major ideas, tricks, tonal shifts or what later parts of the game were going to be like, it just would not have been the same experience. Finished the main story, Solstice and 100% completion in about 8.7 hours. Highly recommended. It's emotional, clever, really memorable, and I genuinely can't think of much else I've played that feels like OneShot. And seriously, if you play it: do Solstice afterward.