A real lack of recent games: Enter the Gungeon

There's this super weird thing about using this blog as a writing exercise in that sometimes I just, uh, forget to finish up a review and never hit that publish button. Or I go back to a game after the review is done and feel like it should be re-written but can't find the energy.

I finished ETG several months ago. Finished with, that is to say, since it is a roguelite.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to roguelite design. Some of my favorite games in recent memory were roguelites, but most of them I find rapidly tedious and get sick of very quickly. They're plagued by forcing you to repeat the first level endlessly and even worse have this sickening unwillingness to program in any amount of conveyance. They're built around the idea that fun is something you need to work for and knowledge is something you acquire through repeated, repetitive play throughs. It's pretty easy for the latter two to turn into pure tedium.

The moment I saw Enter the Gungeon, hereby shortened to Gungeon, I was certain it was a game I wanted to play. For a while I waited on the game to show up in the humble monthly bundle, as I have a sub rolling ever still and humble puts up most Devolver Digital titles sooner than later. But it went cheap on the humble store and they'd given me credit for a referral so I decided the time was now!

I'm pretty certain I'll end up with an extra key sooner than later, it's probably in this month's bundle, knowing my luck.

Regardless, Gungeon is presented as a roguelite dungeon crawler fused with a shmup and a twinstick shooter with cool boss battles; the results lean a fair bit more toward the former than the latter, though this game certainly co-habits the design space you'd put Nuclear Throne and probably several other games I haven't played in. It has a few more buttons that Nuclear Throne and leans harder on the roguelite looting side than gaining XP or gaining loot, with various results.

It also loves puns and loves guns.

 The first thing I want to say about Gungeon, and an element I think has to be addressed before we really talk about any other element of the review. Gungeon has RNG issues, design principles which make it harder to have a 'good run' and easier to have a bad run. Going into specifics will drag the whole of this down, but essentially - the game is programmed to be petulant and frustrating, and wastes a great amount of your time. In fact the most important tip I can give you if you pick up Gungeon is to quick restart any run on floor 1 that doesn't seem a pair of useful chests drop.

So before we go into anything else, let that register: Once you've got the hang of the game, you should repeat floor 1 over and over again until you roll well. The game snowballs in one direction or the other, and a good run is likely to continue to be good, while a bad run is extremely unlikely to recover. As skill increases what you require for a good run lessens, but this remains true until you're very good at the game and I am not good at gungeon in spite of finishing challenges only 5% of players have finished.

But let's get to the positive, because there are a lot of positives to Gungeon.

Gungeon is, as it sounds, a dungeon themed around guns. I'm not too keen on firearms in real life, though I did learn how to fire a rifle,  so you'll forgive me if I use the wrong nomenclature, but the stuff in this game is gun-themed through and through. The teleporters are chambers, the enemies are different ammunition, the weapons that melee are CURSED and the enemies are all gun themed as well. The game has a cute, gun-centric sense of humor to go with it. It's also very referential, for better or worse. There's tons of cute references to other games - the Polaris is a reference to Cave Story, the Heroine a reference to Metroid and so forth - although the game has way too many Zelda references which does get grating.

Except the Bullet, he's fantastic.

Visually the game is gun-tastic, with upbeat and lively sprite art with a ton of details that tickle your brain. Items can be knocked off flipped tables, debris skitters around, there's lighting and reflection in subdued amounts and so forth. It's very pleasing and very pleasant even as you battle to the death with waves of enemies.

I really like the music and audio cues, but mostly the music, which you tend to groove to especially in the later levels. That being said, the game direly needed another two or three tracks in the first two floors, as you spend more than half your time in the game in these sections and they inevitably start to wear. Even as you get very good at floor 1 and 2, and you will or stop playing, they still take time either way.

Gameplay is aggressive and satisfying. There's some aim assistance, I believe, so it's not quite as hard to line up shots as it should be. Bosses and larger enemies take more than just reflexes, you need to pick up on their patterns and use your abilities well. You get a limited number of 'blanks' which clear attacks from the screen, and a single 'on use' item slot that can often change the game a great deal. But only when it is up.

The game does have the "lock the doors, enemies teleport in" element that a lot of FPS shooters do. In fact, that's basically how most battles stretch out and until you get accustomed to the patterns you're often left wondering how long fights are going to be. It works alright in a top down roguelike, but it can feel a little over-restrictive at some points. Some rooms are just tiny and frustrating, as the game becomes repetitive, you become accustomed to that room on that floor being three times as difficult.

All in all, Gungeon is a fast paced and enjoyable permutation of a formula I think is generally done well but not generally done great. That being said, it does have its negatives.

The negatives are a bit harder to highlight without getting a bit too detailed. The game has a ... Thing, at times, about runs going too well and is more than willing to secretly punish the player. A lot of systems are unexplained. For example, there's two "hidden" stats: Coolness and curse. Coolness increases a subset of drops, while curse has a variety of negative effects, including the spawning of the Jammed. The Jammed being about four times stronger versions of normal enemies.

It doesn't really try to explain either. So you need to either, somehow, learn by trial and error or you need to look it up online. There's actually an item that converts curse to coolness and there's little chance you'll understand it. Hilariously, curse has a cap that just kills you (essentially) so you probably want to know how it works and yeah just look it up.

Peak roguelike design, right there: A statistic you can google in an instant, but that the game refuses to explain, because it's a roguelike.

that's racist

Beyond that there's huge balance issues between weapons and loot, and just the drop structure in general. You can end up with a good run turning into a dud when no keys drop and the merchant is in a locked room, you can end up with a new run fizzling out as all the early chests drop garbage. There's probably too many joke items, though a few of them you need to look up to understand the point of.

Basically, there's a bit too much RNG for its own good, but finding that balance is part of the challenge of designing the game. There's lots of other weird issues I could get into, but I think they're all stuff you hit on past about the ten hour mark with the game.

Comparing Nuclear Throne to Gungeon is inevitable, so I'll make it simple and quick. I played NT for seven hours and was entirely sick of it; I played Gungeon for seventy hours and was more just moving onto other games. Gungeon is easier, less repetitive but also less forgiving with a mixture of mechanics I found more acceptable. I like Gungeon better, but they're both flawed games and I can totally see why someone might find NT better than Gungeon.
 
The other thing about the game is, and I think this applies to almost everyone who plays it, you won't come to a satisfying conclusion. For me, I got to the one unlockable character's ending and found it so piss-boring I couldn't focus on trudging through it. I don't really understand why some of the endings are so different from the rest of the game, but fighting two chain gunners who sync up with a melee weapon is just tedium out the ass. That being said, as long as you can handle the RNG and the  realization you probably won't 100% this game before you get bored with it, I think Gungeon is a great game. But those are big caveats, so look at this recommendation sideways and decide if it is for you.