Guncho is a truly mind-melting old west cowboy shooter

polygon.com:

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