Tinker Shot: you do not pick your skills, you build them yourself, part by part

The build-crafting roguelike has become an entire aisle, and most of its games have you choose from a list. Tinker Shot asks you to make the list.

The idea

You create your abilities by mixing parts, effects and upgrades.

The studio states its intent plainly: the goal is to produce combinations ranging from surprisingly effective to delightfully broken.

That distinction matters. In a conventional roguelike your power comes from choosing: you take the best option offered. Here it comes from assembly, and therefore from your ability to see that a mundane part paired with a mundane effect produces something absurd.

And since encounters are physics-driven, a well-built ability can produce a result you did not anticipate. Which is exactly what you want from a game like this.

Around it

You explore the Underground Ruins, a world of strange creatures and twisted situations. The deeper you go, the odder the enemies and relics become.

It all plays out turn by turn, which is the right call for a game about testing assemblies: you have time to understand why your invention just exploded in the wrong place.

What to know

The game launches today, developed by CodeRed and co-published by Rogue Duck Interactive and Gamersky Games, with no price displayed and no reviews as I write.

It is single-player, fully playable with a mouse, with adjustable difficulty and Remote Play Together, which lets you pass the pad to somebody remotely.

My reservation is the one every combination game faces: real depth. A crafting system is only interesting if the parts interact non-trivially. If assembling A and B simply gives A plus B, the game becomes a shopping list in disguise.

What makes me optimistic is the physics. When objects genuinely collide, unforeseen interactions happen on their own, and that is the best engine of surprise a game like this can carry.

Your most ridiculously broken skill? We want to see it on the InsertCoins Discord.