Gunpoint (2013)

There isn't a whole lot of meat to this one. You can beat it in a few hours and it introduces most of its mechanics pretty early on. While later missions do get complicated, I found myself struggling more on early missions since I was still learning the type of puzzles the game was designed around.

Still it's pretty cathartic to jump and hang from the ceiling, then drop ontop of an unsuspecting guard and excessively beat him unconscious. Having the tone of a slapstick comedy rather than a gritty spy thriller. The puzzles are fun to solve and it is designed in a way where you could speed run the whole thing if you really wanted to. I didn't feel inspired to replay levels, since the rewards for doing it aren't that meaningful. Progression is fairly simplistic as well, where you'll unlock some powerups as you complete missions.

I will say the final mission is pretty great. You finally have enough money to unlock the ability to just kick open doors, which is fun especially when the door flying off its hinges knocks out an unsuspecting guard on the other side. Not to mention the assassin you've been chasing immediately spear tackles you out a window, something you would be very liable to do yourself when subduing a guard.

The writing is funny and self aware. There really isn't much a plot, more focused on tropes, but hey it's fun nonetheless with a good sense of humor. I don't regret my time with this one. But again there isn't a whole lot to dissect, but not a bad way to spend a few hours.

What a great game. I love the style, I love the premise, I love the snark. A very relaxing puzzle game without too many quick reactions needed.

The one issue I have is that the UI could use a little fine tuning, but otherwise a great game. Though the quick reload with options for how far in the past you want to go back to is a fantastic feature.

(there's barely any guns)

I recently played this on an effort to clear up my backlog of Humble Bundle games I've almost certainly forgot I bought. Having been burned in the past with sub-par quality in that category I didn't have any strong expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised.

In Gunpoint you play as a cliche'd noir detective hired by even more cliche'd clients to do their biting. In the process you are quickly embroiled into a web of corporate espionage and backstabbing traitors. The genericness of the plot is helped by the wittiness of the dialogue (delivered entirely by text messages with your clients) with several opportunities of breaking the forth wall and lampshading. Or at least that was my experience; but if you are bored by the plot and/or not charmed by the dialogue, you can still enjoy the gameplay.

This is a 2D stealth game in which every mission is basically some iteration of entering a build, hacking a server and bailing out with some alternative but not really important objectives pepper in. The two main mechanics to aid you in your cover operations are the ability to jump very high and fall from great heights and --more interesting in my opinion-- rewiring and connecting switches, doors, lights and even enemy guns. This lends itself to a very satisfying puzzle-like experience; you might choose to connect one motion detector to a light and the light switch to a door so that when the guard passes in front of the motion detector, it turns the lights off so when he tries to turn them back on, he actually opens up the door for you to enter protected by the shroud of darkness.

Of course, you can also just jump through the window on top of the guard and punch him in the face into unconsciousness (which turns out is only one punch), which gives each level a very real sense of replayability.

There are some issues with controls that seem like bugs that got their way into the published version and should've been fixed. For example, in "crosswiring mode" you can scroll though the level with the mouse, but in normal mode you have to use the arrows.

Building some rather intricate chains of cause and effect that are fun to pull off and also interesting to devise but after a couple of levels it begins to get stale an repetitive. Yes, there are a few new tools and other enemies, but the core mechanics stay pretty much the same and you can easily go through every level using the same tricks learned in the first part of the game. Luckily, being only ~4 hours long, the games knows this and doesn't overstate it's welcome.

Gunpoint is a 2D platform, puzzle game of corporate espionage.

Not exactly sure how I came about this game, but once I played the demo version I was hooked in and had to get the full deal. The game is a about a trench coat spy-like character being framed for a murder he did not commit. His goal is to clear his name by infiltrating some corporate facilities and hacking the data from the servers.

The core of this game are basically two mechanics. One of them is the puzzle element. You get your hacking gear and you can access the wire layer of the game. With this you can hook up different things with each other, connect the light switch to a door or power outlet. Flick the switch and a guard can be electrocuted from the outlet or the door will open up. There are different coloured wires to which you get access once you hack the proper coloured control panel. Pretty neat idea and well executed.

Second core mechanic is jumping. From the start you get your jumping boots that let you jump quite far. You get a trajectory of predicted jump and you just lunch yourself. This aspect reminds a bit of Ronin but the focus of this game is more on stealth than action. And it nails it pretty well. Hiding in the shadows to lunch at the opponents or completely avoiding them. Using hacking to turn of lights or distract the guards to pass unnoticed. This works quite well I have to admit.

The graphics are pixel art. Looking good. Nothing spectacular but nothing annoying as well. Didn't mind it at all.

The weakest part of the game is the story or how it's told to be exact. The whole plot is introduced via text box conversations. There is a lot of the text - too much. But that's not the biggest problem. The worst offence is that the game tries to be funny. Tries and fails in this regard. The forced humour gets really annoying really fast. I lost interest pretty fast and soon was skipping over most of the text. It does nothing for the gameplay anyhow.

In the end the game was quite enjoyable and felt fresh. I had fun time playing it. Though I must admit the last few levels felt a bit repetitive. As a whole quite a decent game nonetheless.