One has to admire a clean, straightforward pitch that leaves no room for confusion. Hitman is a game about being a hitman. In Dwarf Fortress, you run a dwarf fortress. With that in mind, you get three guesses at what Maximum Entertainment’s newest release, Squirrel with a Gun, entails.
The “chaotic animal sandbox” genre has become a thriving niche in recent years, spearheaded mostly by Goat Simulator and its larger, more absurd sequel. Polished challengers like DEEER Simulator and countless shovelware imitators have emerged over the past decade, but Squirrel with a Gun adds a certain je ne sais quoi: a gun.
Even on its surface, Squirrel with a Gun‘s elevator pitch is hilarious. It’s rare that a game can extract humor from something as simple as a walk cycle, but seeing your squirrel scamper about with a pistol bigger than it is clutched desperately in its paws manages to do it. The recoil works as you’d expect it to as well, with even a single shot liable to send your extremely determined rodent flying. This only intensifies once you upgrade to long guns, with the comically huge sniper rifle in particular serving more as a means of getting around the map quickly rather than an actual weapon.
Fighting a shadowy government agency with heavy ordnance against the backdrop of a picturesque suburb is a perfect recipe for chaos, as it turns out, and adding an armed, eminently throwable squirrel to the mix only serves to amplify that tenfold. Toss in a dash of puzzle platforming using your guns as mobility tools and cosmetic gathering to outfit your squirrel with an adorable little cowboy hat, and you have a solid iteration on the Goat Simulator formula that should tide you over until the remaster drops later this year.
Squirrel with a Gun is available now on Steam.
