I have been intimidated by Ballistic.exe since the day it was announced. French indie studio Tic Tac Toe Digital described it in their debut trailer as "Like Arma without the fun", a statement which is simultaneously deeply inaccurate and completely correct at the same time. However you describe it, this might be the world's most cursed firearms simulator, letting you bolt together your own custom weapon, load in every single bullet by hand, juggle both sights, your stance and your breathing, slowly squeezing the trigger...

...And then cursing as your low-powered air pistol round falls several feet short of even touching the target.

Set inside a possibly-haunted game within a game, rendered in mostly-monochrome retro Mac style, you're here to kick (paper) ass and take (mannequin) names. While the full game looks to escalate to high-intensity sniper shooting across vast distances where wind velocity and even air humidity can send a shot wild, the demo has you starting out armed with a single-shot air pistol, plinking targets in an abandoned swimming pool, slowly scraping together the reward money necessary to upgrade your weapon into something powerful enough to even hit the targets on the pool's far side.

When I said you had to line up your sights manually, I wasn't kidding. Controlling is a bit like Normal Golf Game; your mouse changes where you're aiming the stock of the weapon, but you need to use your movement buttons to line the barrel up straight so that you can see the rear and front sights in alignment. Then you need to calculate how high to aim to counter gravity, then adjust your stance for stability, then re-adjust your sights to shoot, then pull the trigger and ARGH.... realize that you haven't loaded the gun.

So you go to the interaction screen, manually pull the barrel down, pull a bullet from your belt, move it towards the hole, and let go of the mouse button a fraction early. The bullet falls out of your fingers and into the void, never to be seen again. So you take ANOTHER, load it in, lift the barrel up until it clicks, get back into position, line it up, aim... FIRE! And the shot barely scratches the outer ring of a paper target only six meters away.

Y'know what? I'll take it. And this is before the game bares its teeth, throwing you unusual missions, messing with your vision, and implying that you're working your way towards some strange goal that the characters within the game would very much like to see you succeed. There are locked doors abound in the gun-crafting hub, including a long corridor with a door wrapped in thick chains, taunting me with its existence. There's a payphone that gives cryptic hints to hidden targets, and your in-game instructions are largely redacted.

It feels like a rabbit hole, and I already want to know how deep it goes. I'll just have to get better at shooting if I want to see the bottom. If you've ever played an FPS and just taken the process of aiming and shooting a gun for granted, you should try this demo, if only to remind you that guns are complex, fiddly machines.

Ballistic.exe is out sometime next year, with the demo available to play now. The store page also proudly declares that the game and all bugs within are 100% human-made, further daring "I dare you to put some DLSS 5 on this mess, motherfucker" on their store-page plaque. I approve. Only real human sickos could have made this game, anyway.