HEADCUTTER makes the wall between you and the money optional

You are a bounty hunter in a sci-fi spaghetti western, which means the job arrives as a name, a place, and a head somebody will pay for. The setting is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the level in front of you is not fixed: walls, cover and most of the furniture between you and the target come apart, and blowing a hole through one is a real route rather than a scripted set piece with a red barrel next to it.

The guns are the other half. HEADCUTTER runs a manual firing and loading system — working the action, feeding the chamber and reloading are things you do with inputs, not things that happen to you while an animation plays. Each weapon has its own quirks to learn, and between missions you take them to the gun shop and modify them instead of trading up to the next tier on a rack.

The gore is doing a job too. When the developer promises that anyone standing nearby will repaint the walls and ceiling, that is a feedback channel: in a room where the geometry is changing under fire, the mess is the clearest record of what your last shot actually did and where the person you hit was standing.

Between contracts you are back on the ship with the crew, and the game wants you to talk to them — about the mission, about themselves, about when the canteen opens. Two of them are playable: Jimmy “Lucky” O’Neil, who likes guns, whiskey and old hardware, and Z, who lost his family, an arm and a leg and would like a word with whoever arranged that.

The Rise of the Systemic Game argues that the power in a game comes from objects, characters, environments and rules being able to act on each other, which produces plans and accidents no designer placed by hand. Destructible cover is close to the purest version of that, because it moves route-finding from the level designer to the player mid-fight. It also sets the bar: if the walls only fall where somebody expected them to, the system is a costume, and the maps with multiple paths are just maps with three corridors.

Why Metro Exodus is so Immersive is the reference for the weapons. Its case is that immersion is built out of concrete, slightly inconvenient decisions — physical menus, scavenged upgrades, gear you have to maintain — rather than out of fidelity. Manual loading and per-gun quirks are that exact trade. You give up smoothness and you get a weapon you know, which is why the shop between missions matters more than a bigger number would.

The 4 “P”s of DOOM’s Amazing Combat breaks a single fight into four questions the arena asks at once: priority, preference, preservation and position. Three of them survive destructible geometry unchanged. Position does not. In most shooters position is a question about where the designer put the cover; here it is a question you answer by removing the cover, and so can whatever is shooting back. That is the thing to watch when it ships — whether the room stays readable once both sides can edit it.

HEADCUTTER is made and published by [devpetrichor](https://www.devpetrichor.com.ar/), a single-player Action and Adventure game headed for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is not out yet and there is no date — the store page says the release is to be announced, which is the honest version of soon.

One detail worth noting for a game this loud about viscera: the accessibility list is long. Adjustable text size, colour alternatives, contrast controls, custom volume controls, camera comfort options, adjustable difficulty, no timed inputs, and saving anywhere. A game about turning people inside out that also lets you play it at your own pace is a game somebody thought about past the trailer.

If the appeal is carving your own way through a space instead of walking the one you were given, KAIJECT is the sibling here — it hands you a drill and a living monster and lets the route be whatever you cut through it. Same instinct, opposite scale: one of them removes a wall, the other removes an organ.