Guncho is a truly mind-blowing old-west cowboy shooter

There’s probably a word — and it’s probably long and German and trippingly pleasant on the tongue — for the act of putting off something you enjoy because the thought of it is too hard to contemplate. This is the weird territory in which Guncho lives — or in which Guncho anyway i was alive when i first came across it. Gunchos a turn-based tactics affair, and it’s both compact and playful. But it has a central idea that I found so hard to grasp at first that I could almost feel the cold prickle of my brain freezing in its presence.

The idea—and I’m going to explain this poorly now—is that this is a tactics game in which the direction of your attack really matters. You play as a desperado in a sloppy procedural landscape of hexes, and your job is to shoot down all the enemies that come your way. You can move or shoot each turn. You always shoot first, and your enemy’s movements are clearly telegraphed. This means that no matter what old Western horrors come your way, you can’t complain about not being warned. Instead, most of the early disasters come down to the fact that you were looking the wrong way when you attacked. Or, more accurately, that a crucial part of your weapon was facing the wrong way.

Here’s the complicated part. Shooting someone in Guncho requires you to position your target on the map within range of your six-shooter, but your target must also be on the hex that corresponds to one of the six directions in which your weapon currently has a round in its barrel. This is a strange weapon: the barrel is displayed in a friendly manner on the screen below the action, and rounds don’t come out of the barrel in a straight line, but rather straight out of the barrel itself, at an angle in the direction the barrel currently has them pointed. Enemy to the northeast? That only works for you if you have a round in the northeast chamber of the barrel.

This setup is bad news if you’re like me and find navigating something as complex as a freeway interchange to be a feat of magic, or if you’ve ever considered getting little L’s and R’s tattooed on your hands because the concept of left and right just won’t stick in your memory. But what makes it worse is what happens when you actually manage to shoot someone. Because when you do manage to shoot someone, the cylinder spins, causing the bullets—and any holes created by spent bullets—to change position.

Sometimes it can feel like you’re playing XCOM with a game Bejeweled Twist superimposed over it. It’s XCOM in terms of enemy types and all the nearby walls or exploding barrels. It’s Bejeweled in terms of endlessly rotating a cluster of imaginary hexes in your mind, with you at the center, trying to see if there’s anything promising among them.

Early on, I saw something beautiful here: when enemies approached from the same angle, I found that I could sit there and shoot them all while the room spun in front of me. There were also a few ugly moments where the game made itself inelegant because I just couldn’t play it properly. I was down to one survivor and had to lead them back and forth across the hexes as if we were playing Where the Woozle Wasn’t. This went on, turn after turn, until everything finally aligned and I could shoot them, putting us both out of our misery.

Many of these early problems arose because I couldn’t find the words to help me understand Guncho‘s design. Fortunately, though — or unfortunately, if you’re a writer — I suspect we don’t really understand games in terms of words. Instead, we end up with an understanding of what’s expected of us, with something magical happening between the hands and the eyes and a part of the imagination that deals in images and flickering possibilities rather than nouns and verbs and the vague mysteries of syntax. And so the more of Guncho I played, the more I managed to get to the good stuff, which in this case means, the more I managed to correctly model how I moved, and how that related to how the turret cylinder moved. I started to understand the limits of the game, even if I couldn’t articulate them. And then I started pushing against the limits.

And this is true Guncho‘s strange design not only started to sing, it actually started to make sense. I saw the method in it. I think it comes down to the idea of ​​gunplay and the challenges that filmmakers, writers, and people who design games have faced over the decades in trying to render something so fast-paced and visceral in a way that makes sense but still captures the frantic tension of it. Maybe a movie like The Matrix will thicken time until it becomes a gel that bullets can crawl through. Maybe Lee Child will write the fast parts slowly, so that each shootout becomes eight pages of breathless prose, devoted to eight seconds of soothing hyperviolence. And what does Guncho Doing? Guncho gives you something complex to think about.

It gives you the cylinder and the hexes and the need to align them. What I like about Guncho is that it simultaneously pushes the upper reaches of how close a little tactics game can be, while also giving you a kind of cognitive speed bump, and so it’s your brain that switches into bullet time when things get intense. Voila: you get the ballet of violence as it flows from one impact to the next, but you also get the chance to follow it all, to track it all, to understand the cause and effect because you had to think so hard about lining up each shot in the first place.

And this creates possibilities. At its best, Guncho isn’t about shooting people, it’s about encouraging people to shoot each other while you duck at the last second. It comes down to shape recognition. Some part of my brain would suddenly realize that the hex configuration I was facing was perfectly set up for carnage, if only I could get out of the way. Then the sniper would shoot the booby-trap launcher. Or the angry ram would punch the explosive launcher, who would in turn get lampooned by the wrench-wielder. And me? Miles away, or at least hexes away, sitting on the proverbial beach earning 20 percent.

Years ago, someone told me, during a Western, that Westerns were mostly cotton candy and pear candy: pure nonsense. Two people standing even halfway together with guns drawn would probably miss, hurt themselves, or kill someone in the crowd. I feel like Guncho knows this. It knows that the whole idea of ​​a shootout is foolish, and so it has found this precise, predictable, slightly Heath Robinson-esque way to explore that foolishness in a new way. And that is the closest I can come to capturing this sour, ingenious, slightly opinionated play in something as gripping and uncomfortable as words.

Guncho was released on June 5 on Android, iOS, and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC with code purchased by the author. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.