I am going to preface this by saying if you've never played through the entire game of OneShot and don't want to spoiled, DO NOT READ AHEAD. I am going to put several line spaces so nobody gets accidentally spoiled. Go through the game yourself. It is amazing.
























































Alright, that should be enough.

I know I already said this, but don't read ahead if you haven't already played through the entirety of OneShot.

One style of games I extremely like, being the fan of games and coding that I am, is games that break the fourth wall. Games such as Undertale and Doki Doki Literature Club.

I had heard about OneShot a few times before but never actually looked that much into it. At that age I pretty much overlooked any anime-style game.

That's where is stood in my cognition for about 2 years. Just a Doki Doki Literature Club clone, I thought. (Even though OneShot came first...)

Until one December 2021. December 2021 was an interesting time to be an Undertale fan. Everyone was just coming off of the high of Deltarune Chapter 2. But, I guess, somebody in the Deltarune YouTubers group chat (which, as I initially wrote the script for this article, was a joke; now coming to figure out actually exists) suggested that everyone try OneShot.

Naturally, as one of the main consumers of this type of content, I of course heard about OneShot.  At that point, I made one of the decisions in my gaming life that I regret the most:spoiling the entire main playthrough of OneShot.

I looked through the playlist for the specific playthrough I was watching and found out there was more episodes, so I decided to stop spoiling myself. I had by that point already sowed the seeds for my Dad to get me Steam so I figured I could just play it then.

On April 20th, 2022 (nice), I finally got access to Steam. After a couple weeks, I saved enough money to buy a $20 Steam gift card. I didn't get OneShot because I wanted to buy both F.I.S.H. and the Henry Stickmin Collection.


Fast forward to September 22, 2022. OneShot World Machine Edition launches.

I bought it as soon as possible, (which due to CGC 2022), was October 1, 2022.

I had a goal in mind: get through the main game, and experience the second playthough myself, unspoiled.

I succeeded in that goal.




Lengthy backstory aside, OneShot is an amazing game. The puzzles have you going into the operating system to solve them, and aren't too hard if you know what you're doing. I legitimately have zero gripes with the main game.


OneShot has you take the role of the savior of the world he's thrusted in. The savior, Niko, is basically a cat that stands on two legs and has skin. (that sounds much more gruesome on paper than in my head) Niko has the "sacred" ability to contact their god, the player. (Side note: I don't like how the Switch version handles this. It calls you by your account name, which is much less drawing than calling you by your first name.)


This player-character relationship is something I have not seen any other game do before (and DDLC doesn't count, that was just one point of the story.). Normally, in most games, you are free to do whatever you want  to the characters. They don't feel real. They aren't aware of the outside world.

OneShot's ability to completely demolish this barrier of storytelling is completely unprecedented. It truly feels like something wholly different in the realm of games.

And that's where I would end the article.


...Except. In 2017, a new update to the game called Solstice was released. This update broke my already high expectations  and threw them out the window. Not only does Niko communicate directly with the player more in this update, but he finds out why he exists, that this whole thing is a simulation, and that you wanted to have a second shot. He even tames the robot keeping this world together.

And that, my friends, is how you make a good game.

I've been koola, and OneShot is art. You cannot tell me otherwise.

(83 years is now 290 days.)

Permalink | Comments [0] | Digg This Article | Tweet