In Mike Klubnika's growing oeuvre of brilliantly deplorable games, the same elements tend to recur. First, smoking: deep, long drags to make the lungs burn and eyes water. Second, club music: hard and fast, accented with just a faint sense of melancholy. Third, guns: big and loud, usually aimed at you from point-blank range, ready to blow your brains out.

Across three excellent games in almost as many years - 2023's Buckshot Roulette, 2025's S.p.l.i.t, and 2026's Machine Party - Klubnika has remixed each of these elements with design verve and stylistic aplomb. Buckshot Roulette is a gruesome game of chance delivered at the business end of a pump-action shotgun. S.p.l.i.t. is a Matrix-esque hacking game with the gnarliest, most harrowing ending I've played in recent years. Machine Party, meanwhile, delivers a seedy, hyper-violent take on Mario Party: funny, yes; brutal, too.

But each of these games also contains further tell-tale signs of the expanding Klubnikaverse: grubby low-poly graphics whose every surface seems to be coated in some kind of unpleasant residue; bleak settings that hint at a shared near-future authoritarian setting. These games are short, too, lasting just an hour apiece. But that means they land even harder - thwack - like a pistol whip to the face.

There is a "shared vibe," Klubnika tells me over a video call. "It's like, if you're someone living in this type of universe then you probably don't have what you want most of the time."

" It's hardly crowd-pleasing stuff, but that hasn't stopped his three most recent titles enjoying massive commercial success.

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