Games Like Six Feet Under: The Mortician’s Last Stand

Perdition Flats, Arizona Territory, 1889. You buried them all. You know every name, because you wrote them down. They are not staying buried.

SIX CHAMBERS, AND THEY FIRE IN ORDER

Every level you engrave one chamber. Chamber three bursts, chamber five ricochets, chamber one drinks the blood back. The order never changes, so the cylinder becomes a sequence you read as it turns — and the reload is where you live or die. There is no screen-clearing light show at minute fifteen. The ceiling is low on purpose. You aim every shot from the first night to the last.

CLOSE IT WITH A FLICK

The cylinder turns as a ring around you, in the middle of the picture where your eyes already are. A bright notch comes round once. Snap it shut with a flick of the mouse, a click, or the spacebar — hit the notch and it closes early, miss it and you are standing in the open with an empty gun.

MARKS THAT TOUCH PAY LIKE A HAND

Put the same mark on neighbouring chambers and they pay out like a poker hand — a pair, three of a kind, a flush across all six. And the cylinder wraps, so chamber six touches chamber one. The bench draws a bracket under exactly the chambers making each hand, so you can see what you are holding and what you would be holding before you spend the level. The real decision is deepen or widen. The same mark again can go deeper on a chamber it already occupies, feeding a two-chamber fusion, or take a second chamber and pay you a hand. One card, two directions, and you cannot have both.

HIRE WHAT YOU CAN AFFORD

A peddler's wagon rolls onto the field. The silver you pick off the ground buys laudanum, a full cylinder, a blessed nail — or a hand for hire. The Gambler fires fast and hits light. The Widow takes two seconds a shot and rarely misses. The Sawbones stitches you up where he stands. The Preacher reads over them until they give ground. They walk where you walk, they do one thing each, and anything that touches them is killing them. They do not come back.

FIVE GROUNDS, AND EACH ONE BREAKS A HABIT

SIX WHO CAN WALK OUT THERE

The steady Mortician, the three-chamber Sawbones, the twelve-chamber Preacher, the charm-laden Widow, the ever-shuffling Gambler, and the Revenant who cannot be healed but takes another life off every boss.

THIRTEEN NIGHTS, AND SOMETHING AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SHAFT

A story campaign across three acts. Walk a funeral wagon home while the road ahead is held against you. Empty grave-pits that wake when you step into them. Run the town's ledger to the far fence with everything between you and it. Put down the Hanging Judge, cut down the Hanging Tree, and meet the Pale Rider on open ground with four waves of his own dead between you. The mortician grows between the nights, in the Undertaker's Book — so a night is always six chambers and a steady hand. Finish all thirteen and ride them again at a harder tier; beating a night above your best pays its pages over.

AND THEN THE ENDLESS NIGHTS

Three survivor modes underneath the story: the fixed fifteen-minute night, the Long Night that never ends, and a daily grave on a seed everyone shares.

WOODCUT AND LAMPLIGHT

Every mark in the game is drawn, not painted — hatched ink on aged paper, one colour of brass, and a lot of dark.

WHAT IS IN IT

You buried them once. Do the job properly this time.