Locked and Loaded

A few weeks ago Steam had one of its many -fests for deckbuilders. I’d like to consider myself a card game enthusiast, and deckbuilders have been a recurring feature on this site as a result, but I won’t lie to y’all – I had an awful time. So many games just felt like Hearthstone with extra steps, Slay the Spire but worse, or somewhere in between. As I got to the very last game in my queue I was starting to question if the genre’s boom was finally busted, if I was going to have to dump every game in the post-Balatro era.

Fortunately for me, the last game in the chamber was a little student project called .Forty-Five. Not only did this game blow its competition straight out of the water, it did it for exactly zero dollars. You can just have this thing right now! Let me tell you why it belongs on your hard drive.

.Forty-Five has an incredibly simple core conceit. You’re a gunfighter. You run into other gunfighters. Fill them with a lethal quantity of bullets before they do the same to you, then pick your next spot and take a moment to collect and fuss with your ever-growing bullet collection before you repeat the process. The game isn’t interested in wasting your time. Get in there and start shootin’, tex.

Combat is handled with your funky 5-chambered cylinder. You draw your bullets from your deck, slide them into the chambers of your choice, then pull the trigger to fire them and automatically rotate. Your bullets are absolutely nutter butters (more on those in a minute), and this core system of when to hold ’em and when to unload ‘em is consistently interesting to puzzle on and satisfying to execute. Couple this with the game’s take on defense cards being parrying bullets with bullets your own, meaning you have to opt not to fire it and instead end turn with that bullet ready to block for its attack value, and it means defending yourself is infinitely more interesting than games like this typically achieve. What do you give up to protect your neck? Will that extra rotation mess up a combo? Do you just really want to shoot them with one more poison bullet, high speed lead poisoning be damned?

Odds are good that the last part will at least tempt you. Bullets are cards here, and these things are wildly creative. Early on you can reasonably just slam bullets one by one and unload into your opponents, but that quickly stops being true as many bullets come with powerful but non-obvious benefits. Saving your third bullet after firing it, for example, to ensure you can use it again the second time around. This can combo with stackable status effects, like fire or poison, which compound harder and harder as you fan the hammer. Maybe you use a magic effect to spin your cylinder the other way, and that combos with a bullet that keeps dealing damage on each rotation until you fire it. Or a literal arrow that takes up a slot forever, doing mediocre damage, but allowing you guaranteed trigger pulls. Did I mention that firing a blank chamber hurts you, so you can’t just rapid fire your way to combo nirvana? You gotta earn your keep in these parts. 

I’m not even going to get into how good all the status effects and fight events are as they’re worth discovering for yourself, but I will spoil one from fairly early on. There’s a type of fight that puts your actions on a timer. Before you let this stress you out, understand that this is a fairly generous 10 seconds and it doesn’t end your whole turn. Instead it pulls the trigger for you exactly once. You just need to be 10 seconds ahead of your seemingly-possessed iron, and shooting manually resets the clock, but that pressure alone can completely shift how you cobble together your combos. It does an excellent job testing the skills you’ve started to build, a confirmation of your card literacy thus far, and a minor gut check that’s unlikely to kill you but still hurts if you still haven’t quite managed to get the game’s cadence down. In short, like everything else in the game, it’s a tad rough but undeniably well executed.

Speaking of execution, let’s talk overkill. Any game like this has an economy for buying cards and supplies, and .Forty-Five only pays you for as much damage as you didn’t need. Every point of damage past 0 is a dollar, and I cannot believe I haven’t seen this system done in a deckbuilder before. Making overkill and cash 1:1 incentivizes perfect balance of defense and offense, trying to set opponents up with juuuuust a smidge of health before blowing them to kingdom come without getting shot to swiss cheese first. The temptation to stretch a fight out just one more turn as you try to draw into your bombs is ever present, and that tension only ratchets up as your enemies grow stronger and you need more moolah. The game also takes care to reward you with bullet options after most events, keeping the dopamine flowing. Sure it’s a bit of a downer in the rare case where a post-fight offering has a duplicate card, but hey, free stuff!

It is absolutely insane that a small student project has games made by massive teams with far greater budgets beat on mechanical creativity and quality of life. I haven’t even mentioned how it allows you to construct multiple decks mid-run! And just switch builds on the fly! It’s amazing! I never knew I wanted that because no other game in this niche has committed to the idea this hard! Your backpack lets you hang onto interesting combo pieces without ruining your deck so you can try different builds whenever you want, as well as switch decks entirely if you’re going into a fight where the one you’ve been using would be disadvantaged. It also solves the genre’s often limited access to culling crap cards out of your decks because, you know, you can just reconstruct between fights and pocket the rest. It’s a simple solution to a complex problem, and I’m kind of in awe of just how well it works.

I won’t pretend I don’t have notes. The hand-drawn art style is charming but could be shined up a tad for clarity. Writing is weak and has some typos. Sound on the whole is a bit repetitive and limited. Do I want more bullet sounds? Yes, desperately, they deserve it. But does any of that really matter? At time of writing this game is being actively updated on a weekly basis, and the game was released open source, so moddability is well within the community’s grasp. You can feel that this game, moreso than just about any of the other games in the most recent Steam Deck Builders Fest, comes from a place of deep understanding and appreciation of the genre that allows them to both embrace and subvert its conventions. .Forty-Five feels like a gift made by card game people for card game people, and we’d all be fools to turn it down. 

As a final note to the devs themselves: I respect not charging for a student project but I want to be clear: if a sequel or some sort of substantial expansion comes along, please let me give you money for it. I’ll be there with spurs on.

8/10