Enter the Gungeon is a bullet hell, roguelike, dungeon crawler video game. In other words, players have to navigate a procedurally generated labyrinth as tons of projectiles are fired their way in order to find a mythical gun that can kill the past. That about… sums it up.
But the specifics are where the game, developed by Dodge Roll Games, truly shines. The player chooses one of several characters, all with various backstories, to send into the gaping maw of the Gungeon. Each has a specific loadout that they start with, but the rest of the game is a crapshoot. There’s no telling what you might find down below.
At one point during my PAX South demo, I encountered an ability that slowed down time whenever I flipped a table. Flipped tables, by the way, are an easy way to create simple cover in a fight. Also, my gun shot several bullets at once during this ability. The next time I ran through the demo, I didn’t even make it to a chest before succumbing to my wounds.
One big difference between Enter the Gungeon and several other popular roguelikes on the market is that Gungeon features an interesting dodge invincibility mechanic. As the bullets are flying around and it seems like there’s no way to avoid them, players can instead choose to do a sort of roll into them that makes characters briefly invincible.
“Briefly” in that there are several frames where the player can’t be hurt, but there’s always a few where the character’s recovering that enemies can damage them. There’s no way to infinitely chain these in such a way that a given character is always invincible, so there’s a lot of quick strategizing that comes into play as rooms with several enemies fill the air. “Do I dodge now and then weave out of the way of that other salvo or what” is a regular refrain.
There are a variety of enemies scattered throughout the Gungeon with a number of attack patterns. Often as not, two or even three types of enemies are on the screen at the same time, and juggling all of that can get hectic fast. Thankfully, being a Gungeon and all, there are loads of weapons to fiddle with in order to teach them who’s boss.
Enter the Gungeon is scheduled to release sometime around April 2016 for PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, and Linux.
