oneshot is another one of those "play it without knowing anything" games, but it's a little lighter on those elements than more infamous examples like outer wilds or inscryption—there's a lot going on in the game that doesn't really necessitate total blindness, but there are definitely some moments that only really hit when you don't see them coming.
this is an important bit of preamble for establishing the context with which I was playing the game: I was informed that this was another one of those metanarrative whatsits that reaches out from behind the fourth wall to rattle you around a bit, and so I approached the game expecting a lot more convolution, I braced for needing to think really hard to Get It.
but oneshot, ultimately, is a simple but effectively told little yarn about the most categorically adorable creature you've ever seen getting familiar with a fantastical world and its delightful denizens. it's a story more for the heart than the head, and excels in the speed with which it gets you invested in the lives of all the creatures you come across. and it's a good thing it does, because walking around talking to people is the entirety of the gameplay!
the most compelling of these relationships is actually with niko, the player character themselves. there are frequent moments where niko provides details about their home life and other thoughts on the goings-on of the story, and they're both a vocal and energetic participant in almost every conversation you have, big or small. niko is cute on all of those easy superficial levels, to be sure, but it was really the writing of their character that made me feel like I had a genuine relationship with them as a player. that's not easy to do!
and then, of course, there are the characters themselves. I would be here for way too long if I wanted to sit down and talk about every single character I found myself charmed by, so instead I want to comment on the powerful sense of intimacy that prevailed throughout most of these conversations. (though I can't let it remain unsaid that I love silver with all my heart and spent every single minute she was on screen wanting to kneel before her as a knight would their lord. you can't put a really tall stoic robot lady struggling with her emotions, newfound humanity, and relationship with her awkward but well-meaning creator and not expect me to get insanely sapphic about it.)
the overall tone of oneshot, despite all the colorful quirkiness to it, is a subdued and mundane one, with niko getting glimpses into everyday life for the people of this world and the many facets that revolve around it. substantial time is taken to explaining the main source of energy for this world, phosphor, and the many ways in which it can be harvested and used throughout society. niko's role as the "savior" is rooted into the folklore of society, and various characters have their own opinions and beliefs about that folklore. there's countless non-essential but nonetheless narratively integral areas, documents, dialogues, and other things to partake in everywhere you look, bringing you that much closer to the world niko is meant to save.
the music and environmental design compliment this very well—the soundtrack is the perfect kind of calm and rhythmic ambience to suit the act of wandering around the game in quiet contemplation, and the areas of the game have a monochrome, low-saturation look that makes them the perfect kind of grounded and cohesive glue for everything else to fit together with. it's also, of course, straightforwardly gorgeous and evocative, with some of the special cgs (like the one pictured above) being especially breathtaking.
but, doubling back to that saving the world thing: you're informed pretty early on that the sun is dying, and that this world is doomed to die with it, with only niko and the lightbulb they hold offering even the chance to preserve the world for a little while longer. but what makes this save the world plot interesting is that there are a lot of contrasting opinions about it, with some denizens of the world expressing weariness at the futility of this cycle or even outright suggesting that perhaps the world is better left to its natural course. you really get the impression that these are people battered and tired from their constant battle with entropy.
and even worse than the business with the sun, there are also garbled, rogue pixels called "squares" that corrupt and destroy anything in their path. all of the aforementioned melancholy in the game's tone puts this otherwise straightforward plot into muddy waters, and makes even the lighthearted mundane interactions of this game narratively weighty. there's a strong sense of what's at stake here, and every single piece of attention put into everything I've been talking about makes the world's fate that much more important.
so, enough preamble. a sentence found in the game's description that I've been intentionally sidestepping reads: "the world knows you exist." what does that mean?
⚠ ENTER THE SPOILERZONE ⚠
so here's where we get into that metanarrative stuff I was talking about before. but see, when most games do spooky things like speaking directly to the player or messing with their computer (which, by the way, I don't think I've had the fear of god stricken into me quite like when oneshot changed my desktop wallpaper without permission. I didn't even know rpg maker could do that!) they're doing it to create a new dynamic between the player and the game. usually this dynamic takes these two forms, either in isolation or in a more nuanced blend:
- the game says boo or otherwise startles/disorients the player to get a desired reaction out of them, then immediately retreats back behind the fourth wall and generally acts like nothing happened, e.g. psycho mantis or a lot of daniel mullins's tricks
- a metanarrative is established that encompasses some or all literal elements of the game, with the means by which the player mechanically interfaces with the game becoming actions with narrative stakes, e.g. doki doki literature club, imscared, or undertale
the thing about the latter category, though, is that the construction of this metanarrative usually supersedes some of those non-meta aspects of the game. player characters become narratively irrelevant puppets, aspects of the game's outward-facing design become extensions of a narrative entity, and in some of the most extreme examples, all the ground-level pieces of the game—settings, characters, menus—are stripped of any narrative meaning beyond the roles they have in communicating with the player.
oneshot is special, because it's the only game I've ever played that has made its metanarrative part of the existing diegetic narrative. let me explain:
first off, the game is extremely selective about what it does with the fourth wall. only a handful of characters are aware of the artificial nature of their world, and even fewer are aware of the existence of the player. that said, it's not particularly coy about it either, with it being established early on that niko is able to perceive and talk to you, the player, due to their role as savior. you become a confidant and companion to niko throughout their journey, with the decisions you make and control you have over them in the game recontextualized as a literal thing that you as a person are doing because you care and because you want the best for this little guy. you become a character in the story, playing your role and establishing connections with other characters—even though you can't talk to anyone but niko, niko talks to people about you, and they subsequently comment on your actions and role in the story!
not only that, but although the game seems to do the thing where it has a mind of its own, speaks to the player, fucks with your computer and so on, these aren't actions being taken by "oneshot the video game" in a holistic sense, they're being taken by "the self-loathing pile of code that happens to be currently taking the form of a video game on your computer", or as the content in the post-release "solstice" chapter calls it, "the world machine". the video game becomes personified through the character of the world machine, but just as the player is treated as being on equal narrative footing with all their fellow characters in this story, so too is the world machine. you and it just speak in a different language than everyone else.
and the best thing about all of this is, the metanarrative is only effective because of the effectiveness of the diegetic narrative, because the importance of diegetic narrative is the whole point of the metanarrative!
at the end of the game, after you retrieve the three special thingies that grant you and niko access to "the tower", you undergo a scene starring four characters: you, niko, the world machine, and "the author", a mysterious figure who's implied (and later confirmed during solstice) to have created the world machine in the first place. the world machine seeks death, but also takes on a seemingly protective role towards niko, who it feels was cruelly taken from their own world. the author, speaking through a completely separate executable file containing notes that must be overlaid with the main game window to solve various puzzles, explains the situation and regrets what's developed from their actions. niko is torn, trusting you after everything you've been through before but starting to fully realize just how much being away from home hurts.
and you, the player, have to make a choice. either you replace the sun, letting this world continue to live and dooming niko forever...or destroy the sun and cast the world and all the other people you've spent so long growing fond of into destruction, for the sake of letting an innocent child go home again.
this was it. this was the most gutwrenching, most difficult, most real decision a video game has ever presented to me, because despite this all being a fake bunch of code on my computer, the feelings I had were real. I loved niko, and I loved this world, and I had to make the choice to let one of those things die. I sat at that screen for what must have been about ten minutes, every single thought completely arrested by this decision. I've never in my life been this completely immersed in a video game.
I chose to save niko. it wasn't easy, but niko's love of their family and longing for home hit me too hard to ignore.
the best part, though? solstice, the post-release content I mentioned before, is about going back and getting an ending of the game where everybody lives and everything ends up okay. and it does it without sabotaging the weight of that choice at all.
basically, solstice has you going through a new playthrough of the game, but with the addition of a journal item that allows access to new areas. it also establishes what the world machine actually is: it's a simulation of a previous world, the surviving denizens of which you meet over the course of the game, that takes the form of a program on your computer. at no point is it called a "game", but its artificial nature is laid bare—npcs are referred to as such, it's explained that the world stops existing when the game isn't being played, and all the other mechanical functions of the real-world program on your real-world computer are given diegetic significance as functions of this world machine.
and niko reacts appropriately to someone who's been told that the pivotal decision the player made back in the original playthrough didn't actually change anything! they're confused, upset, and pained by the disconnect between their tattered memories and the pre-programmed ignorance of the world around them. things are even more perilous this time, too, with the world machine lashing out at the player for meddling in things that lie outside the supposed boundaries of the game, corrupting the world much more aggressively and becoming a much more imposing antagonist.
so then, why would you do this? for the same reason you'd replay any other game to get the true ending: because you love it.
there's a concept, a piece of worldbuilding introduced early into the game about the many robots that live in the world: the idea of "taming". to be "tamed" as an artificial being is, essentially, to be able to act outside of your programming, and to be indistinguishable from a living being—and not because it actually becomes any more real, but because a living being establishes a bond with it and treats the robot as though it was real. the aforementioned silver was the first attempt to create a tamed robot, which succeeded but also caused a disastrous incident of some sort that forced her to be exiled from the rest of society in the barrens.
the internal conflict of the world machine, which also happens to be a sort of artificial being, is that it hates itself for its own artificial nature. it's a program that's pained by being beholden to the parameters of a computer, bound by code and incapable of handling conflicts without tearing itself apart. but in the final confrontation of solstice, niko explains to the world machine that it was already tamed, because it was loved, and it was loved by you. you, regardless of the artificial and pre-programmed nature of this world, engaged with it and explored it and grew attached to it. it gave you feelings, and those feelings were real. you spent time with it, and that passage of time was real. you developed relationships with those characters, and those relationships were real. and that choice at the end of the first playthrough was so excruciatingly difficult because your love of this world was real.
and so here you are, trying harder than ever to save a world you've been shown and told is doomed in countless different ways, because you love it. and because you love it, that makes it real.
I have not in my entire life up to this point seen a work of fiction that so compellingly speaks to the unstoppable force of the human mind to find love in everything it sees, nor one that cherises that capacity for love so dearly. when the ending showed me niko giving me a heartfelt goodbye, saying that I'll live on in their memories just as they and everything else in this world will live on in mine, and walking outside the game window towards home, I waved back. I reflexively waved goodbye to a video game character on my computer screen. do you understand how powerful that is?
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