Gunpoint

Gunpoint is a very sweet, simple game. The two main mechanics (jumping and hacking) feel pretty smooth and easy to use, and these two actions alone account for a sliding bar of how a player might want to approach the game's levels.

Generally, levels are most cleanly beaten in one of two ways. The first requires a lot of finesse, save reloading, and speed, with minimal hacking to open doors and manipulate guards as you instead stealth around enemies, jump around constantly, acquire your objectives, and leave. The second requires an extensive amount of hacking, considering your options, and carefully making it through different areas, hooking up objects in the game in complex ways to get the result you're looking for. Of course, many players will find themselves somewhere in the middle, which is where the game works best. Sometimes problems seem easy to solve with a large amount of hacking, while others can be cut through with careful, quick movement and consideration for each guard's field of view.

A lot of people seem to have issues with the length of the game, and I can see why. I was able to 100% it (which, for the purposes of this review, I am considering as "getting all steam achievements and an A+ on every level") in just under 5 hours. However, I didn't find this to be much of an issue, especially considering the game often goes on sale for a mere $2 (as it was when someone gifted it to me for Christmas). I think the game actually would've gotten stale rather quickly with too much added on length and levels, though this itself is a critique of the game design–while I think the game as it is now is perfectly fit for a 3-4 hour experience, this mainly derives from a lack of depth in the game mechanics, something which I noticed really strongly once I went back to levels to "master" them.

Plainly put, once all the upgrades are unlocked (especially the final door-busting upgrade) the game can become a bit of a cakewalk. Once you realize how quickly you can sprint through levels with consideration for the "optional objective" of that level, problems become incredibly easy to solve with an A+ ranking. For instance: if an optional objective says to do minimal violence, you can rush towards the objective, still knock multiple guards out non-lethally, and get an A+ ranking. If the secondary objective asks you to collect the laptops instead, now you can feel free to run around, get spotted, and murder anyone you feel like as long as you grab the bonus laptop, and you still end up with an A+ ranking.

Of course, I think these issues only really show up in the final levels and the post-game. This is because, despite the game using an upgrade unlocking system that requires money and points from missions, the game itself carefully doles out these currencies just enough so you can only really get certain upgrades at a time, with many of them being required to do certain missions in the first place (which often makes me wonder why it was implemented in the first place). From what I can tell, the ranking doesn't affect the amount of money you get, and you always get an added upgrade point at the end of every level no matter what. It's a bit janky, especially considering how some abilities, such as breaking windows with making noise or hooking up the guns of enemies to hackable objects, require you to spend "energy" to use, something which persists through missions and requires you to find in-mission or buy yourself, meaning it's very possible to be stuck with no money, no energy, and no way to gain new money (all missions completed), meaning if you want to get more energy you either have to replay levels that have them lying around or exploit a glitch in the game which allows you generate infinite energy.

I think my last negative point would be about the story, but I can't tell if I can really muster up the energy to be "negative" about something I started ignoring about halfway through the game. Your mileage may vary, but much of the dialogue consists of:
Main Character: Hey there.
Client: [gives you a lot of expository dialogue]
Main Character: Hmm... should I... Option A: Say a normal line to continue the conversation... Option B: Say a normal line to continue the conversation... or Option C: Say a silly line that the client will ignore the continue the conversation...?
There are exceptions to this, but even those are incredibly minor... off the top of my head, the closest comparison is immersive sim-type games that include ineffectual "sarcastic" options, i.e. Fallout 4. The game even presents multiple "moral" choices that I couldn't really give a damn about, instead going through both choices to get the related achievements. They don't affect the levels of the game at all and I couldn't find myself interested in the dialogue and characters enough to consider them seriously. The game seems poisoned with this awkward mix of by-the-numbers storytelling and tongue-in-cheek humor that I tuned out of quickly.

In a sense, I'm not sure if I should support the developer for trying to implement so many different versions of "player choice" in the story, upgrades, etc. when most of the impactful player choice actually happens moment-by-moment in the gameplay itself, with everything else feeling like unneeded fluff.

I think that's enough negativity now because, obviously, I do like this game a lot! Most of the negatives up above are easily ignored, really–the story is inconsequential and skippable, achievement hunting and post-game competition are unnecessary, and without either of these aspects you're still left with a really good 3-4 hours of fun, interesting gameplay for cheap.

There are also a lot of positives that stand by their own which I haven't mentioned yet, especially the music, which is incredibly smooth and jazzy, with each song switching seamlessly to a darker, more electronic variant of itself whenever you enter the hacking view, an effect which continued to excite me even when I had finished the game and was going back in for post-game experimentation. This is a game where I never felt the need to turn off the audio and listen to something else during it, which... is something I can't say for a lot of games.

The artwork and design are good enough as well–I'm not going to sing too many praises, especially with how shoddy a lot of the menus are, but the pixel art style here uses a lot of contrasting colors and brightness between the player, enemies, and the background to make each object pop out, a concept which a lot of pixel art games can completely fail at, especially around the time this game came out when it seemed like every indie game came baked-in with a haphazard implementation of pixel art without proper consideration for how readable the game's objects are.

My last compliment is one that I think a lot of people are going to underestimate in terms of its power–the autosave system. The game constantly autosaves whenever you do anything important, from buying an upgrade, accepting a mission, entering a level, moving around, opening a door, etc... this makes it so when you die, you can choose from multiple different autosaves to reload from depending on how recently you screwed up. What some people may not realize is these saves are not just for in-game mistakes, but function as actual saves–I had an issue with this game where it would crash often, something I actually won't hold against it considering I was having to emulate PC steam through Crossover in order to play the game on my Mac OS since it wouldn't run a 32-bit game (goddamn Catalina...). However, every time I booted the game back up, it would be exactly where I left off, whether that was in the middle of a dialogue tree or a mission–it's astounding. I honestly think this save system is one of its best features, a hidden "third" element next to its main jumping and hacking mechanics. Once I realized how easy it was to reload saves from 1-20 seconds ago, I would do it constantly in the middle of missions to correct mistakes, sometimes reloading a save even though I hadn't died just to try something out a bit differently. It's a godsend, and I'm still amazed it works so flawlessly that it can even save your progress to allow for easy recovery after an unfortunate crash.

This is a game that stands so strongly on its positive elements (gameplay, autosaving, music, player expression) that its more negative aspects (lack of depth, length for $10 price tag, story, occasional jank) can almost entirely be ignored, especially considering how minor they are for a majority of your playtime. If you're someone who finds $10 to be steep for the possible minimum of 2-3 hours this game lasts, I'd recommend it on sale–but that's a strong recommendation. For the $2 this was listed at in the Steam winter sale, this is a steal. It's a game with mechanics that have maintained their freshness even after 7 years, which unfortunately can't be said for all indie games of the early 2010s.