Petting dogs in games is old news: in boomer shooter Ripout, you can pet your gun

Ripout’s standout feature is not the retro-future 80’s aesthetic. It’s not the excellent gunplay, or the way little aliens that scurry around its industrial spaceships before attaching themselves to bigger aliens and coming to kill you. It’s not the looter shooter aspiration, nor is it the rogue-like setup of its levels. No, it’s the gun. Your gun. Your pet gun.

That’s right, your gun is alive – and it’s not something incessant and irritating like your Johnson in Shadows of the Damned, or those endlessly quipping lunatic firearms in High on Life. Your gun is better; more ‘man’s best friend’ than ‘obnoxious bellend’. In Ripout, you wield a little pet alien, resembling something somewhere between a shrunken-down xenomorph and gothic gargoyle, that fires bullets from its maw and snatches body parts off grotesque aliens. And you can pet it, if you feel so obliged.

This living weapon is at the center of everything Ripout is doing. The game, a self-confessed boomer shooter from a team of developers that take rich inspiration from 90s shooters, is a gameplay-first effort that has no cutscenes, no cinematics, and no “fluff” (per the creative director, Goran Rajsic). Instead, the 10-person strong development team has focused all its efforts on the shooting, the level setup, and – of course – your gun.