OneShot is one of the oldest games in my backlog, and while playing it I realized it had a lot in common with one of the newest games I’ve played: 2022 indie darling Stray.
The most obvious similarity is that in both games you play as a cat. Granted, Niko (OneShot’s protagonist) objects to being called a cat multiple times throughout the game, maintaining that he’s just a little boy. To this I say: come on dude. From what I’ve seen, 100% of OneShot fandom content is Niko-based. Their design is too on-point not to love. Stray’s protagonist, on the other hand, is a literal, normal orange cat. This cat has inspired a similar level of fan adoration because they might be the most faithfully recreated digital cat ever made. They jump around, they meow, they walk on narrow surfaces, they sit on things, and they get their head stuck in paper bags. They’re perfect.
Both OneShot and Stray find the player guiding their respective cats through decaying futuristic environments full of robots. The sense that the current world has already died and the survivors are living in its ashes permeates both games. There’s this nostalgic sadness about them, where the bones of the old world are clearly visible but its clear that their time has passed and there can be no going back. In both games hope for the future is restored when the protagonist restores the sun, giving the world a second lease on life.
Both games’ protagonists have a supernatural guide of some kind - in Stray this is B-12, a little robot remembers human society. B-12 acts as a translator between the cat and the robots and can do things in the environment that require opposable thumbs. In OneShot this supernatural guide is the player, in the role of the setting’s god (get it because the game exists on your computer). As god you can also interact with the world in ways that Niko can’t, but in this case you’re literally manipulating game files and data on your machine. I have no idea how this works on console. One some level, both of these deuteragonists are the ones with the real agency. In Stray’s case, since the B-12 does all the talking and a lot of the interacting, one could argue that the cat has no idea what’s going on and is stumbling through the adventure completely by accident, motivated by cat urges only. Similarly, OneShot’s player controls all of Niko’s actions and solves problems on a level that Niko doesn’t understand, to the point that I felt like Niko was just sort of a pawn doing your bidding and didn’t have a lot of motivation and agency on their own. It really undermines the idea that Niko is a real, living person inside your computer, which the game really wants you to buy in to.One final similarity here is that both games feature their supernatural guides parting ways with the main character in a sad way in the final act.
A surprisingly non-obvious similarity is that both these games are indie games. Well, it’s obvious for OneShot because it is so clearly made in RPG Maker 2003. Playing it made me really nostalgic for the era this game came out, when OFF was popular and Homestuck was doing interactive flash game panels. Also emblematic of that era is its sort of faux-depth where it leans on breaking the fourth wall instead of actual plot. People were really trying to copy Earthbound hard in those days, specifically the aspects where everything in the environment is interactable and the game and characters talk directly to the player. OneShot didn’t really sell this for me, I think it’s too light on actual internal plot to make the fourth-wall breaking work. The effectiveness of OneShot’s final ethical conundrum relies on the player really buying into the game’s kayfabe in a way that I didn’t feel like the actual writing justified. To it’s credit, the setting of OneShot is great at setting a spooky, melancholic tone, but there’s no payoff for the lingering dread you’re made to feel. Once you make your Final Decision, the game just sort of ends without exploring the impact very much. I think OneShot wants you to replay it for the True Ending but I wasn’t hooked enough by the main game to want to do that. Undertale actually achieves everything that One Shot attempts to do, and it did all of it so well it seems to have killed the “RPG Maker game that’s actually a REAL WORLD inside your computer!!” trend. I’m glad, in my opinion, after the third or fourth such game you play it gets kind of twee and annoying.
Where Stray is concerned, you could be forgiven for thinking that was an indie title because it’s such a visual feast. Being able to explore its wonderful cyberpunk environments (as a cat) is the game’s biggest draw, even more so than the gameplay. What might tip you off to the indie status is how short the game is. Clearly the developers set themselves a tight scope for their game so that they could execute on it to the best of their ability (and they did!), but it really leaves you craving more. Tons of mechanics are introduced just to be used in one puzzle and then dropped forever. I’d love to see Stray get the Portal 2 treatment where it’s fleshed out into a full 10s of hour long game where all of the cat and B-12’s abilities are recombined in every possible way to solve puzzles.
Stray’s writing is also pretty tight and doesn’t overindulge in the way that some indie adventure games do. It really made me feel some feelings with its themes about survival after the end of the world. There’s something to the fact that the robots of Stray are more human than most video game humans. They not only continue the human legacy but have developed a society and a culture of their own. But at the same time, their society replicates the same inequalities of the human society that came before. Most post-apocalyptic settings have really misanthropic themes so it was so refreshing to see this sort of meditation on both the good and bad of humanity, and the will to survive, told via these cool robots. It leaves you with this bittersweet but ultimately optimistic feeling.
Gameplay wise, both OneShot and Stray are adventure games, but incredibly different in pace. Most of Stray is a 3rd-person explore-em-up where you traverse the environment to find items and give them to NPCs to solve puzzles. These sections are alternated with high-speed parkour, the ideal sort of action gameplay for a cat. I’ve seen people describe Stray as a platformer but you can’t actually fail the jumps, so it’s a lot more about getting the timing correct, almost like a rhythm game. OneShot is also a classic bring-items-to-NPCs adventure game but is sooo slow. Like, Niko walks sooooo sloooooow. It’s not the worst thing on earth since the game is only like four hours long, and Niko is carrying a giant lightbulb the whole time so they’ve gotta be careful, I guess. But it was annoying enough to put me off replaying the game for the True Ending or finish quests I missed.
To sum up, it’s really cool to see how far indie games have come between 2014 and 2022. I don’t think something like Stray would have even been possible a decade ago, not just technologically but like from an economic standpoint, indie developers didn’t have the same level of publisher support this sort of high-profile undertaking requires. Both OneShot and Stray are really short games that you could bang out in a day, and both are good enough that I’d recommend them on that basis alone. Stray is a bit pricey for its length at $30, but I think it’s worth it for the AAA-tier effort from the team at BlueTwelve. And if you have the choice, play OneShot on a PC - in windowed mode.
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