.Forty-Five

Free, open-source deckbuilding roguelites aren't a common combination, and .Forty-Five leans into that novelty from the moment you load it up: a hand-drawn western world, a revolver instead of a normal card hand, and not a single microtransaction, advertisement, or price tag anywhere in sight. That last detail alone drives a remarkable share of the review sample's enthusiasm — reviewers repeatedly express genuine disbelief that something this well-made costs nothing, several explicitly saying they wish there were a way to pay for it. Underneath that goodwill, though, sits a game still working through real crashes, a punishing early difficulty spike, and a support timeline that suggests its active development window may already be behind it.

A genuinely clever twist on a familiar formula

The Slay the Spire-style card-battler roguelite is a crowded genre by now, and .Forty-Five earns its comparisons to that game honestly while doing something distinct with the format. Instead of drawing a hand of cards each turn, you load bullets — each with a unique effect — into a six-chamber revolver, meaning capacity, rotation order, and reload timing all become tactical considerations in their own right. "The unique revolver mechanics and bullet synergies are a breath of fresh air," one reviewer writes, and a more experienced deckbuilder fan goes further: "this game has layers upon layers of strategy," praising the story and artwork alongside the mechanical hook. That praise is echoed closely enough across the sample that it reads as a genuinely successful piece of design, not just a reskin of an existing genre with a cowboy hat on top.

Real, repeated technical problems

Set against that praise is a consistent, specific run of technical complaints. "It crashes too much dude... I am not gonna be like 'duhhh I want my money back' for a free game but only reason I am unrecommending it is because its making me work to play it," one reviewer writes, and the sentiment repeats across multiple independent accounts of crashes occurring every few minutes. More seriously, at least two reviewers describe a specific save-corruption bug: one reports that "bullets break" on loading a save, rendering runs unplayable, while another states plainly they "lost all saved bullets after run ended due to bug." These aren't vague performance gripes — they're specific, reproducible-sounding failures that strike directly at player progress, and their repetition across independent reviewers suggests real, unresolved issues rather than isolated hardware problems.

A difficulty curve several reviewers call unfair, not just hard

A second cluster of complaints concerns balance, specifically in the game's early stretch. Multiple reviewers cite the same concrete detail: enemies with roughly 110 health appearing very early in a run, against a starting deck dealing single-digit damage per hit. "After killing two 110 health enemies with attacks that do about 8 damage is extremely tiring," one reviewer writes, and another frames the deeper structural issue behind that number: too few cards drawn per turn and almost no card-draw effects to compensate, unlike the genre's established fundamentals. "There is an extremely good reason most roguelike deck builders have FIVE cards drawn at the start of each turn and not two," one detailed review argues, treating this as a design gap rather than simply a difficulty preference — a specific, testable claim that's hard to dismiss given how many separate reviewers land on some version of the same math.

Real support, for a while

To the developer's credit, the partner-events feed confirms .Forty-Five received a genuinely dense support cadence in its early life: weekly updates ran from launch through the middle of 2024, followed by community-driven "Bullet Contest" and "Bulletin" content events running into December 2024. That's a real, sustained effort for a free, open-source solo or small-team project, and it directly addresses one reviewer's worry, visible in the negative sample, that updates had already stopped. What the same feed also shows, though, is that visible activity on this specific game quiets down after that December 2024 event, with the developer's next public move being the May 2026 announcement of a full successor, ".Forty-Five: Reloaded" — a reasonable next step for a small studio wanting to rebuild on stronger foundations, but one that leaves this original, still-crash-prone version without a clear path to further fixes.

What "free and open source" actually buys you

It's worth pausing on what the open-source licensing specifically means for this review's recommendation, beyond the immediate goodwill of a zero price tag. Unlike a free-to-play game backed by a live-service monetisation plan, .Forty-Five has no obvious commercial incentive left to keep it maintained now that the developer's attention has visibly shifted toward "Reloaded" — there's no storefront, no cosmetic shop, no season pass revenue to protect by continuing to patch this version. That cuts both ways: on one hand, it means nothing was ever held back behind a paywall, and everything reviewers praise about the mechanical depth and art is genuinely the whole product, not a curtailed preview of a bigger monetised system. On the other hand, it also means the crash and save-corruption bugs documented above have less of a built-in commercial reason to get fixed than they would in a paid game still generating revenue, which makes the open-source license itself the most realistic path to a community-patched, more stable version, if and when someone takes it up.

Final verdict

.Forty-Five is a clever, generous, genuinely well-designed free roguelite that earns the goodwill its price tag generates, built around a revolver-loading twist that stands on its own mechanical merits rather than riding purely on novelty. But it's also a game with real, repeated crash and save-corruption problems, and a difficulty curve that a meaningfully sized share of its own fans call unfair rather than simply challenging. Worth downloading without hesitation given the cost, but go in expecting some frustration alongside the fun — and keep an eye on "Reloaded" if a more polished version of the same idea is what you're actually after.