SIDE EFFECTS is a disturbing pill-popping roulette game out now

SIDE EFFECTS from developer Free Lives takes the idea of Buckshot Roulette and puts a brutal pill-popping spin on it. Note: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.

Playable in solo against the NPC AI, or online for up to 4 players it's all about chugging down pills and often just hoping for the best since you don't exactly know which way the pills will swing for you. Sounds just like real life in some ways when it comes to medical issues. Only here, it's not about hoping the medication cures you - it's each player trying not to die while you're all strapped in.

Based on rounds, with each beginning by giving you a set of tools to pick from and then dropping a bunch of pills on the table for you to take turns ingesting them. You have two different types of health bars in this one to keep an eye on and manage. There's your actual health, and a resistance meter that acts like armour with zero resistance meaning potentially certain death as it will drop one of your hearts.

While a lot of it is down to chance on the pills you take, there is a certain amount of strategy to it with the various tools you get. There's a sweet that let's you skip a turn, a hammer to smash a pill so no one can take it, a tool to detect what a pill will do and more. You even get an injection that will swap the effects of a pill, if you're feeling real lucky. You can even mess with other players using pliers now and then to pull out their teeth, dropping their resistance down - especially useful if you wish to focus on taking someone out. Bit gruesome though.

As the rounds go on, new pill types are introduced with different effects and so you have more and more that will potentially end your life.

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The online mode is the same just with more players available via matchmaking or joining via lobby codes. So it's nice to see both options available, especially if you don't always have people available to play with. And in my case, only one key was supplied so I had to test it out playing against randoms. Thankfully, the online mode does appear to work quite well to be able to. It's missing a bunch of options though like how it has no chat of any sort - so half the time you're waiting for the lobby to fill as players keep popping in and out.

SIDE EFFECTS can get pretty intense, especially when you're running low on health and other players have items that you know they're going to be saving for you. But I can't help the feeling like it's just missing something, it feels a bit too slow at times while you're waiting for your turn. This is one where I feel it's pretty much essential that you play it with people you know to get the full enjoyment out of it.

It's as disturbing as it is interesting as an experimental game of risk and works just fine with Proton 10 on Linux.

At £4.29 it's an interesting cheap choice to add to your list of games to play with friends.