18+ Only. Play Responsibly.
The word CHAOS appeared across the middle row.
The game killed everybody.
Not metaphorically.
The brain disappeared.
The pizza disappeared.
The stop sign disappeared.
The shark disappeared.
Every normal paying symbol on the five reels was replaced by a black square carrying the visual enthusiasm of a corrupted file.
C.
H.
A.
O.
S.
Five letters.
Five Glitch Dogs.
They appeared where the word had been, each one looking like a cat had been assembled from electrical faults, bad intentions and whatever parts were left behind after somebody rebooted the alley with a hammer.
Then the dogs jumped.
All five of them.
One went upward.
Two crossed into different reels.
Another dropped toward the bottom.
The last vanished and reappeared on the far side.
The grid settled.
The first dog glitched.
For a fraction of a second it was no longer a dog.
It became a screaming green skull.
The skull revealed a multiplier.
Another dog changed into a Cranky Cat.
Another became something even less pleased about existing.
Numbers began appearing above the reels.
I had been playing €1.20.
This was spin nine.
The previous eight had returned €3.60 in total.
I had started with €300 and was sitting at €292.80 when five pieces of graffiti successfully completed a word and triggered neighbourhood-wide digital extinction.
Unleashed Chaos had not needed much time to explain itself.
The street around the reels looked as though three competing graffiti crews had been given the same wall and none had been told the others were coming.
Purple.
Blue.
Acid green.
Red.
Spray paint over spray paint.
A huge blue cat stood on the left wearing a red checked jacket and holding a frying pan.
He had the smile of an animal who had already solved a disagreement with cookware.
On the right stood a green character holding two smaller creatures at arm’s length.
The reels contained dripping brains, pizza, stop signs, sharks, low symbols painted like tags and several kinds of angry cat.
Nothing on the screen appeared to have passed through an adult first.
The EPIC DROP continued.
The five Glitch Dogs revealed their temporary identities.
One Sketchy Skull added to its reel.
A Cranky Cat altered another.
The values above the reels changed again.
One dog had now spent perhaps two seconds in existence and already had a more complicated personal history than most mammals.
The final reveal finished.
The Reel Multipliers added to 14x.
€16.80 landed.
Balance:
€309.60.
The five dogs vanished.
The dead symbols vanished.
Pizza returned.
The brain returned.
The stop sign returned.
The city had experienced total symbolic collapse for €16.80 and resumed exactly where it left off.
I stayed at €1.20.
There was no reason to interfere.
The next stretch was much quieter.
A pair of sharks contributed to €1.20.
Three brains managed €2.40.
Then several spins provided little beyond opportunities to inspect the frying pan.
One Cranky Cat landed with no useful line around it.
A STOP sign connected for another small amount.
The balance moved downward again.
€306.
€302.40.
A €2.40 hit.
Then blanks.
One FS symbol appeared.
Gone.
Another spin brought two.
No third.
The colours kept moving.
The characters remained furious.
The game behaved almost normally, which by then seemed suspicious.
Fourteen paid spins after the EPIC DROP had returned €6.
The balance was €298.80.
I pressed again.
Three FS symbols landed.
No spelling required.
No dog needed to impersonate punctuation.
The screen changed.
CTRL + ALT + CHAOS.
Three lives.
The ordinary symbols were gone.
This time they were supposed to be gone.
Dead symbols occupied the grid.
No pizza.
No brains.
No sharks.
The Life Meter waited outside the reels while the Reel Multipliers started at their low values.
First spin.
A Sketchy Skull landed.
Green face.
Huge teeth.
Expression of somebody discovering the reboot had failed.
It revealed 4x.
Reel two increased.
The Life Meter returned to three.
The next spin placed another multiplier creature on reel four.
Small value.
Another reset.
Three lives again.
This was already a very different kind of bonus.
Nothing needed to form a normal line.
The street had stopped paying attention to combinations and started feeding numbers into five separate pieces of machinery above the reels.
Then the dog arrived.
Glitch Dog.
One position near the bottom of reel five.
The Life Meter jumped back to full.
The dog shook.
Pixelated.
Became a Cranky Cat.
3x.
Reel five changed.
The creature returned to dog form.
Next spin, it was somewhere else.
Reel three.
Same dog.
Different address.
It glitched again.
Sketchy Skull.
The value went into the Reel Multiplier.
Dog again.
The bonus continued.
At this point I was following the animal rather than the numbers.
There were other Crazy Multipliers landing.
Some added modest amounts.
One skull added 5x to reel one.
Another creature touched reel four.
Each arrival kept resetting the Life Meter.
But the dog had established a separate problem.
It could not maintain a species for the duration of one reveal.
Dog.
Skull.
Dog.
Cat.
Dog.
Something screaming.
Dog.
The alley had created a pet that required taxonomy to be updated between spins.
Then it landed on reel two and glitched into an Epic Sketchy Skull.
That was different.
The skull appeared with the same general expression as the normal version, except now the damage did not stay on one reel.
Its revealed value was added across all the Reel Multipliers.
Every number above the grid moved.
Reel one.
Reel two.
Reel three.
Reel four.
Reel five.
All up.
The Glitch Dog returned.
Perfectly fine.
No apparent memory of having just become a skull capable of altering the entire street.
Two spins later, another Crazy Multiplier landed before the Life Meter could run low.
Back to three.
A second one followed.
More numbers.
The multipliers above the reels were becoming uneven now.
One had grown much faster than the others.
Another was still modest.
The third had benefited repeatedly from the dog’s movements.
A dry spin took one life.
Another took the second.
One life remaining.
The next grid filled almost entirely with dead symbols.
Nothing moved.
The dog did not arrive.
No skull.
No cat.
For the first time in several spins, the game looked genuinely broken rather than enthusiastically broken.
Last life.
Spin.
Glitch Dog.
Reel four.
The meter returned to three.
The animal immediately malfunctioned.
Epic Cranky Cat.
The value revealed.
2x.
Every Reel Multiplier doubled.
All five.
The row of numbers above the reels changed at once.
The Glitch Dog came back afterward with its tongue out.
That was the point at which the bonus became completely unreasonable.
A dog had entered reel four.
Turned into a cat.
Multiplied five separate pieces of arithmetic.
Turned back into a dog.
And prolonged its own feature by arriving.
No part of the street reacted.
The frying-pan cat was no longer visible during the bonus, but he would have approved.
The extra lives gave the feature another run.
A Sketchy Skull added to reel three.
Reset.
A Cranky Cat multiplied a reel.
Reset.
Then a long dead patch.
One life gone.
Another.
The Glitch Dog jumped into reel one but this time its reveal was small.
Still enough to keep everything alive.
Three lives again.
The reel values crept upward.
Not spectacularly on every spin.
That was what made the larger transformations dangerous.
A 2x addition was one thing.
An Epic creature touching every reel after they had already been built for several spins was something else.
Eventually the dog stopped arriving.
First empty spin.
One life.
Second.
Two.
The final spin landed nothing capable of refilling the meter.
Dead symbols.
Dead symbols.
More dead symbols.
The most stable things in the entire game had turned out to be the ones explicitly labelled dead.
The bonus ended.
Five Reel Multipliers remained above the ruins.
Their combined value:
92x.
The stake had never moved from €1.20.
€110.40.
The balance climbed from €297.60 to €408.
The grid cleared.
The street returned.
Pizza.
Brains.
Graffiti.
Sharks.
The blue cat with the frying pan.
The green figure on the other side.
Everything was back where it belonged.
Almost.
For a moment the Glitch Dog remained on the feature summary in its normal form.
After spending the bonus as a skull, a cat, an Epic skull, an Epic cat and several different pieces of multiplication, it had finally managed to be a dog again.
I left it there.
€408.
€108 above where I had started.
The next €1.20 spin never got the chance to find out what species it was.
Buffalo Goes Wild II spins like a poker face with mood swings.