I searched to see if we had one of these already, but it doesn't look like we do. Because I'm very enthused about it I'm going to go on an entire spiel for the people who don't know what OneShot is. OneShot is an RPG Maker game which was originally made in 2014. It has a heavily meta narrative, focusing on three things: a dying, sunless world; the messiah, Niko, a deliberately gender-ambiguous Person who holds the lightbulb which is going to become the world's new sun; and you, the God of the world, who directly converses with both Niko and the world itself. The original game centred around a key ethical problem which you had to answer; the rerelease recently came out with the Solstice update, which adds a third, true ending once you play through the original route once. The game features a content warning for paranoia, which I'll mention here too. Spoiler: Basically, paranoia cw, and self-harm and suicide allusions. Because it's such a meta-heavy game, it does things like reads from your user account to call you by name (you can change your name later), creates a new file in your documents, and at one point changes your wallpaper to help you with a puzzle (it changes back). There's one object which says 'hello' to you in a creepy robot voice when Niko greets it. Spoiler: specifics (It's the penguin. You don't lose anything by not talking to it.) You're asked to delete or move indicated files in the game's folders to interact with the game at a few points. There's no real trace of a fourth wall, so if that sort of story bothers you, OneShot might not be your cup of tea. Also, there are heavy suicidal/self-harm allusions in the True Ending, though they're passed through a layer of metaphor because of who's going through them. On the other hand, if you enjoy stories like The Velveteen Rabbit, Transistor, Homestuck, Undertale, Read Only Memories, OFF, or any of the many excellent despair-heavy magical girl shows, you might enjoy OneShot. If you're a coder who gets really invested in their code, you might be interested in OneShot. If you liked One Chance, another indie game with the 'you only have one chance to play this' theme, you might also like OneShot, which plays with very similar themes. (The original 2014 version was one you could only play once, unless you edited registries or made a new user account. The Steam rerelease still makes you jump through a hoop, but it's a much more user-friendly hoop and is helpfully marked by previous things you've learned in the game.) It's a pretty short game - I finished it in about seven hours. Note that if you want to replay the True Ending, you should probably make a copy of your completed first run's save files beforehand. Your save files are stashed in in Users\[USER]\AppData\Roaming\Oneshot. (Because you can only play through the True Ending once, unless you delete your savefiles, which means you have to play through the original game once again, since you have to have played it before for it to give you the NG+... boy, getting around the one shot sure is complicated. At least you don't need to edit your registry any more!) It's two am so I have no clue if I covered everything here but LET'S GET RIGHT DOWN TO IT FOLKS (ETA: added the MOST IMPORTANT media link. And then I thought of another link between games people might have liked and this one. It's real late here folks.)
Spoiler: true ending spoilers, caps IT'S A SUICIDAL MACHINE VELVETEEN RABBIT HIDDEN BEHIND A TROLLEY PROBLEM AND IT FUCKED ME UP I AM WELL AND TRULY FUCKED UP Like???? The trolley problem was bad enough holy shit you can't just pull that sort of bleak shit out of nowhere!* And then there was more to it and it got RAPIDLY MORE META and holy shit poor Niko *I am compelled to edit this to state that it was not, in fact, out of nowhere, and in fact was foreshadowed all the way back at Maize, because this game is fantastic and this raises very important questions about the nature of niko's reality AND ANOTHER THING: GEORGE FUCKED ME UP. The implications of George fuck me up! Like not only are we dealing with a fucking world machine we're also dealing with one alternate reality out of several like. Does that explain the people who go back and edit their save files???? We're just going through another alternate reality? That seems to be the implication holy shit. AND THE WHOLE THING WAS JUST WOVEN TOGETHER SO FUCKING WELL I'M YELL......................... IT'S GOOD
