Guncho is a truly mind-melting 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 very thought of it is too arduous to contemplate. This is the strange territory in which Guncho lives — or in which Guncho lived when I first encountered it, anyway. Guncho’s a turn-based tactics affair, and it’s both compact and playful. But it has a central conceit that I initially found so hard to get my head around that I could almost feel the chill prickle of my brain seizing up in its presence.

The idea — and I’m about to explain this badly — is that it’s a tactics game in which the direction of your attack really matters. You play as a desperado on a scrabbly procedural landscape of hexes, and your job is to shoot all the enemies coming at you. You can either move or shoot each turn. You will always shoot first, and your enemy’s moves are clearly telegraphed. This means that, regardless of whatever old west horrors are headed your way, you can’t complain that you weren’t warned. Instead, most early disasters come down to the fact that you were facing in the wrong direction when you attacked. Or, more precisely, that a crucial part of your gun was facing in the wrong direction.

Here’s the complex part. Shooting someone in Guncho requires you to position your target on the map within range of your six-shooter, but your target also needs to be on the hex that corresponds to one of the six directions in which your gun currently has a bullet in the cylinder. This is a strange gun: Its cylinder is obligingly displayed on the screen below the action, and the bullets don’t come out of the barrel in a straight line so much as they emerge directly from the cylinder itself, angled in the direction in which the cylinder currently has them pointed. Enemy to your northeast? That only works for you if you have a bullet in the northeast chamber of the cylinder.

This setup is bad news if you’re like me and the act of navigating something as complex as a highway interchange amounts to wizardry, or if you’ve ever contemplated having tiny L and Rs tattooed on your hands because the concept of left and right just will not lodge in the memory. But what makes it worse is what happens whenever you actually do manage to shoot someone. Because when you do manage to shoot someone, the cylinder rotates, so the bullets — and any gaps created by spent bullets — change positions.

It can feel at times like you’re playing XCOM with a game of Bejeweled Twist laid over the top of it. It’s XCOM in terms of the enemies types and any 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 of it all, and you’re trying to see if anything promising lines up.

Early on, I caught glimpses of something beautiful here: If enemies advanced from the same angle, I discovered that I could stay put and gun them all down as the chamber rotated for me. Equally, I had a few ugly instances where the game rendered itself inelegant because I simply couldn’t play it properly. I’d be down to one surviving straggler, and I’d have to lead them back and forth over the hexes like we were playing Where the Woozle Wasn’t. This went on, turn after turn, until everything finally aligned and I could shoot them, putting both of us out of our misery.

A lot of these early problems arose because I could not find the words to help me understand Guncho’s design. Happily, though — or unhappily if you’re a writer — I suspect we don’t really understand games in terms of words. Instead, we eventually gain an understanding of what’s required of us, with something magical happening between the hands and the eyes and a part of the imagination that trades in images and flickering possibilities rather than nouns and verbs and the vaporous mysteries of syntax. And so the more of Guncho I played, the more I managed to get to the good stuff, which means, in this case, the more I managed to correctly model how I moved, and how that related to how the revolver cylinder moved. I started to understand the boundaries of the game, even if I couldn’t hope to articulate them. And then I started to push against the boundaries.

Image: Arnold Wauers, Terri Vellmann, and Sam Webster via Polygon

And this is where Guncho’s oddball design didn’t just start to sing, it actually started to make sense. I saw the method within it all. I think it comes down to the very idea of gunfights and the challenges over the decades that filmmakers, writers, and people who design games have encountered while seeking to depict something so swift and instinctive in a way that makes sense but still captures the hectic thrill of it all. Maybe a movie like The Matrix will thicken time until it becomes a gel that bullets can move through at a trackable crawl. Maybe Lee Child will write the fast stuff slow, so each shootout becomes eight pages of breathy prose devoted to eight seconds of soothing hyper-violence. And what does Guncho do? Guncho gives you something complex to think about.

It gives you the cylinder and the hexes and the need to line them up. What I love about Guncho is that it’s simultaneously pushing at the upper reaches of how dense a small tactics game can be, while also giving you a sort of cognitive speed bump, and so it’s your brain that switches to bullet time when things get brisk. Voila: you get the ballet of violence as it flows from one impact to the next, but you also get 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, but rather about encouraging people to shoot each other while you duck out at the last minute. It comes down to recognising shapes. Some part of my brain would suddenly realize that the hex configuration I was faced with was perfectly rigged for carnage, if only I could get myself out of the way. Then the sniper would shoot the trap-thrower. Or the angry ram would butt the explosives lobber, who would in turn end up lamped by the wrench-swinger. And me? Miles away, or hexes away at least, sitting on the proverbial beach and earning 20 percent.

Years ago, someone told me, during a western, that westerns were mainly candy floss and pear drops: pure nonsense. Two people standing even fairly close to each other with guns drawn were likely to miss, or injure themselves, or kill someone in the crowd. I feel like Guncho knows this. It knows that the whole idea of a shootout is silly, and so it’s found this precise, predictable, slightly Heath Robinson way to explore that silliness in a new way. And that’s the closest I can get to capturing this tart, ingenious, slightly ornery game in something as grasping and awkward as words.

Guncho was released 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.