Squirrel With A Gun Is Inspired By Two Huge Titles
Squirrel With a Gun might be one of the oddest games to have been announced recently, and it has been revealed to be inspired by two huge gaming titles.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: the recipe for true genius lies in taking the discovered and previously known elements and mixing them up into something no one has ever seen before. In the world of video games, this approach allows gamers to inhabit strange new worlds, discover new experiences, and show us things we never dreamed of, allowing us to be anything we want to be — even a Squirrel with a Gun — a project-in-development inspired by two massive gaming titles.
According to IGN, when the footage of an upcoming indie title Squirrel with a Gun went viral last week, first on Twitter, then the rest of the internet, nobody thought it was actually inspired by open-world action-adventures RPGs. The titles that first came to everyone’s mind were 2019’s puzzle stealth game Untitled Goose Game (10/10 on Steam) and 2014’s third-person sandbox adventure game Goat Simulator (9/10 on Steam), and it’s easy to see why. However, the upcoming game was actually inspired by the Yakuza franchise and Shadow of Colossus.
The upcoming indie game, which still doesn’t have a release window, let alone a date, is about exactly what it says on the packaging; Squirrel with a Gun is about a squirrel with a gun and all the mischief the little rodent can make. As seen in the trailer, it’s likely that you’ll be able to take humans hostage or extort them for valuables, like a smartphone or a cake — though we’d argue that the latter is more valuable to a squirrel.
In an interview with IGN, Squirrel with a Gun creator Daniel DeEntremont shared his inspirations about how the eponymous squirrel would interact with the in-game opponents and the in-game environment. Apparently, the game maker thought that the heat actions from the Yakuza franchise would fit great in a game with a squirrel. On the other hand, DeEntremont also liked the idea of the game’s protagonist climbing much bigger enemies and opponents in an attempt to overcome them, like the action seen in the Shadow of Colossus game — which got a PlayStation 4 remake.
Yakuza’s heat moves are cinematically presented combat moves and finishers that range from intense close-ups to less impressive moves like hitting someone in the head with a bike. This feature would look great in moments in which the squirrel delivers a final shot, or someone disarms her with a flyswatter. Climbing on humans, either by frontally attacking them or by crawling up their pant legs, is still in development, but it sounds like an up-close melee attack instead of the squirrel’s usual range attacks.
We forgot to mention that the titular squirrel can also fly, despite being a regular tree squirrel, by using automated weapons, such as Uzi machine pistols. Squirrel with a Gun has the potential to become a truly impressive gaming title once it releases. Besides the aforementioned gaming titles featuring geese, goats, and squirrels, we also got a Sim City-like builder game featuring beavers set in a post-apocalyptic world.
