Designed by Little Cat Feet and officially uploaded to Steam on December 8, 2016, the puzzle adventure game OneShot follows a small child with cat-like features named Niko who has been taken from their world to save the in-game world (OneShot). Niko must return the sun – a light bulb – to the Tower with the help of the dying world’s inhabitants and by interacting directly with you, the god, through breaking the fourth wall. Through various puzzles, you find yourself at the ending with an awful choice: to send Niko home and have the world die in an instant or to save the world and Niko will never again return to their home and family. The game spends a lot of time making sure that the player is a separate entity from Niko. You are not playing as Niko so much as you are guiding them as a deity and parental figure. In addition to allowing the player to interact with Niko, the game cleverly goes outside of its boundaries to force the player to hunt for clues within your own computer’s files and desktop, making the whole experience very personal. The game mechanics of allowing the player to become the god of a sunless world plus the invasive techniques of the player’s private computer that the game employs makes the ultimate decision a truly horrible moral dilemma. For Niko is not making the choice themselves, it is you who decides their fate.
Right off the bat, the game knows who you are. I will be inserting my own name into the dialogue when necessary. Niko wakes up in a room with a computer, which is locked to them, but once they try and access it, a Windows dialogue box pops up, saying “Do you know what that means, Morgan?” (OneShot). The player has never before been prompted to include their name in the game. In his article about OneShot, Rock Paper Shotgun’s John Walker discovered that the game goes into your Windows profile and steals the necessary name from there (Walker). You can change the name as you desire, but this very simple questions is the catalyst to just how much the game interacts with you as your own character. Now in game, the computer continues talking to only the player, saying ominously, “You found me. Why? You’re already too late. Not much of the world remains...This place was never worth saving…remember this: Your actions here will affect Niko. Your ‘mission’ is to help Niko leave” (OneShot). During this dialogue, Niko simply stands there, apparently unaware of what is happening. Soon after finding the sun and discovering that they are savior of this world, Niko finds that they can talk with the god. You can have a conversation with the curious young child through dialogue options.
Very quickly, Niko becomes incredibly endearing to the player, not only asking for support, but also, just asking about your own world. You become attached to them and it is truly sad whenever you have to close the game for the night and reopen it to Niko’s worried relief. You realize that they know when you leave because they says things such as: “It happened again. Everything just went really dark. So dark, the lightbulb doesn’t even light it!” (OneShot). It makes you feel absolutely terrible that you left poor Niko by themselves. This is an effective use of a Non-Playable Character, or NPC, that Katherine Isbister talks about in her work How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. She references Hush, a game where a mother must quiet a baby to keep from being discovered by enemies, stating that “playing the game and caring for the virtual child create a form of participation and involvement…” (Isbister). In OneShot, Niko is one such child. By using a game mechanic where they are fully aware of you leaving them alone, the game instills in the player a feeling like they have betrayed Niko and abandoned them in a dark world, alluding to the choice you must make at the end of the game.
The game continues to intrude on the player’s personal computer, in the guise of the computer consoles in the game. You discover that the being talking directly to you through those computers is something known as the Entity. The Entity wishes to guide you to the Tower where it resides through things hidden in various places and in different ways as clues to puzzles that the player must help Niko solve. One time, a symbol is left on your desktop, showing the correct path for Niko to walk in. Another instance gives you a screen of numbers. The computer demands that you “take this film and expose it to the void. The answer will be revealed when you bring it back again,” meaning for the player to drag the page off screen and back again, which illuminates a few numbers to use as a combination (OneShot). When finally entering the Tower, Niko comes into a black room with a red X on the floor. Based on a translated book from a mysterious being called the Author, you know by his guidelines of “Look at the pattern on the floor. Do as it says. The window will be gone, so you need to bring it back” (OneShot). This is an indicator to click the X in the corner of the screen to exit the game and by restarting, thereby bringing back the window, you can continue. The game engages the player, not Niko, in this way. It forces you to leave Niko in order to accomplish what it demands. Niko cannot progress in their journey without your ability to figure out the answers. They rely on you, as a child to a parent.
Once you move past that X challenge, the game rips the player from your adopted child, forcing you to simply watch as the Entity speaks with Niko, telling them that you have left. Your connection has been severed and you are helpless as the Entity tells Niko that they have finished their mission and to sleep. The Entity then opens a Microsoft dialogue box and flatly tells you, “Now as for you, Morgan. We are done here. Please don’t return to this world again,” before forcing the game to shut down (OneShot). A handwritten note from the Author appears, telling the player to continue through a different game file in your computer’s documents. The Entity is furious, now downright malicious as it sends you dialogue box after dialogue box before forcing Niko into a dark labyrinth. They still cannot hear you, but you are able to guide them through with numerous pages from the Author, who tells you the Entity’s story. He also tells you about the ultimate choice: “The sun is the messiah’s tie to the world. As long as the sun is intact, the messiah remains trapped here. Shattering the sun may terminate the world, but it is also the only way for the messiah to return home. I did not realize things could end up like this…please forgive me” (OneShot). Upon finding your way through the maze, the Entity contacts you once more, preying on your love for Niko and their safety, mockingly saying, “You only have one shot, Morgan…At least, tell Niko the truth…you do care about Niko, don’t you?” (OneShot). After that, the Entity leaves you with your choice and Niko with the ability to hear you once more. The player now knows both sides of the story, the Entity’s and the Author’s, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter about their story. It is how you decide to end Niko’s that this whole out-of-game experience has been leading you towards this entire time.
Desperate for a way to let Niko decide for themselves, you give them the choice, but you are the god of this world and Niko’s guide and caregiver in this strange new land. They ask you, “What’s the right thing to do?” relying on the god that they have looked up to throughout the game (OneShot). The player is forced to make the decision. The game has come out of the game and gotten into your head, just as Niko has made a place in your heart. If you bring Niko home, they thank you for everything, and literally walk off the game screen and onto your desktop, leaving the world and the game behind. There are then stills from the game that fade to black as the world dies. If you return the sun, Niko says the heartbreaking line of “I’ll be okay,” leading into shots of the world and everyone looking up at the new sun. Niko is nowhere to be seen, hinting that replacing the sun killed them in the process (OneShot). Regardless of the choice the player makes, you have destroyed something beautiful.
The game has made it abundantly clear that it was you, not Niko. It was you who made that choice. OneShot does not allow you to find behind Niko as the protagonist. Through the immersive game mechanics and breaking the fourth wall, you truly feel the weight of your decision. This type of invasion of privacy and separation of characters makes you care more about the outcome of the protagonist’s adventure because they have been your constant companion, not you playing by yourself. It makes players wonder what how other games would change if done in OneShot’s unique format and question what was the right choice for Niko. The game leaves you always feeling like you made the wrong one. But like the Entity said, you only have one shot.
Works Cited
Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. The MIT Press, 2016. PDF file.
OneShot. Developed by Little Cat Feet, Degica, 8 Dec. 2016.
Walker, John. “Wot I Think: OneShot.” Rock Paper Shotgun, https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/12/12/oneshot-review/. Accessed 19 Oct. 2019.
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