Five Finger Fillet is, like many things, undoubtedly a creation fuelled by medieval bozos with too much time on their hands and booze in their bodies. Grab a knife and stab it between your fingers? For fun? Definitely the invention of an alcohol-addled mind. It is also something I am unbelievably rubbish at, as someone with mediocre hand-eye coordination and a tendency to get the shakies.
So it should come as no surprise that, given 20 minutes to stab between my digits 500 times, it took embarrassingly little time for me to slice my ring finger clean off with a butter knife. Not in real life, mind. I'm not that stupid. I'm talking about 500 Finger Fillet, a roguelite spin which shackles your (not real) wrist to a table while a pointy (or in my case, rather blunt) instrument attached to a rickety crane hovers over you, frantically twitching around while you slam a button and hope it doesn't come down onto your precious flesh. All while a maniacal teddy bear head watches your every move.
The game isn't totally demented in its demands, at least. It splits up those 500 stabs into tidy rounds of 50 stabs apiece—this is where the roguelite stuff comes in—with a breather halfway through and an opportunity to buy items. There's medication to help manage your pain meter when you inevitably slice yourself open a little, tablets to recuperate lost blood, and rings that can offer stat boosts or keep your precious pinky safe from being severed entirely.
When each round is over, you'll have to pick a new weapon, and this is where 500 Finger Fillet had a pleasant amount of strategic depth to it. Surface area is a big consideration, like picking a syringe over a box cutter—the latter of which I did and proceeded to lose all my fingers in record time. There's also a severe percentage attached, along with how much pain and blood loss getting stabbed with it will cause. Each one also comes with special conditions—one gives you money every time you stab yourself, while another rewards you for consecutive misses, instead.
It's a delicate balancing act of challenge and reward, something that I am still finding as I've only successfully made it through six of 500 Finger Fillet's 10 rounds. I'm more than ready to continue tackling it, though—thanks to a little meta-progression that persists between failed attempts, which is always nice—and emerge from my half-thousand stabs with all my fingers attached and my blood still in my body.
500 Finger Fillet currently has a demo as part of Steam Next Fest, with the full game out on November 12.