They’re just names that you’re told should be familiar, and you have no sense of place. But if you haven’t, you don’t get any sense of completeness or sympathy or connection. If you haven’t played the prior game, then all of that can read like fun lampshade-hanging on the fact that you as a player know who these characters are even as your character doesn’t. All of the characters in the game refer to you as someone they already know. So it’s a sequel that actively demolishes the engagement you had with the prior game…if it is a sequel.
Exit the Gungeon immediately removes that conclusion and traps you right back in a situation wherein all that you accomplished was hastening the end of your world and removing any sense of accomplishment from before. See, the endings of Enter the Gungeon were meant to be conclusive. Because, as is sadly too often the case, by trying to make a story set five seconds after the first game ended, you turn the whole experience of the first game into a shallow prelude before things go wildly south. If you’ve played that game, it’s kind of a nice chance to check in on what happened after the credits rolled… Everyone is an outsized personality, often times serving as both a reminder and a reference of other games while also being familiar presences for experienced fans of Enter the Gungeon. It’s not an excuse plot, but the whole thing is handled with a comfortable tongue-in-cheek style of absurdity. Which also means that each of the Gungeoneers is trying to climb back out while only having the faintest memory of what brought them into the Gungeon in the first place. In other words, the Gungeon is now coming apart. Exit the Gungeon picks up after the aforementioned characters have attained their goal, only to find that the thing about shooting the past is that it tends to create a whole lot of temporal paradoxes and problems in the process. Each of the game’s numerous Gungeoneers were shooting through the place in the hopes of acquiring that gun to correct something horribly wrong in the past. The premise of Enter the Gungeon was that within the eponymous Gungeon lay a gun that had the power to shoot and erase the past. This is kind of its greatest strength and its biggest weakness. Primer and Powderĭespite the fact that the whole stated premise of Exit the Gungeon is not to serve as a sequel, the game is not just a sequel but an explicit sequel to the first game. The Steam version was played for this review. And if that sounds like a lot of genre descriptors to shove into a single line and you’re wondering how a game could be all of those things…well, it sort of can’t.Īnd, unfortunately, the ways it tries to fit all of that into the same space is also where Exit the Gungeon starts to become a seriously irritating piece of work.Įxit the Gungeon is out now for Nintendo Switch, Apple Arcade, and Steam. Rather than being a top-down affair, it’s a side-scrolling platformer bullet hell…er…not actually roguelike, but it’s pretending to be.
The point of Exit the Gungeon is not to be a sequel (despite the title) so much as a spinoff into both a shorter development turnaround and an altogether different style of gameplay. It’s one of those overwhelmingly loved games that people will look at you askance for not playing, an indie darling where most people either at least like it or recognize that the game isn’t bad, it just isn’t for them. Some game concepts do not weather a format shift very well.Įnter the Gungeon was something of a darling with reviewers when it arrived it was a top-down dungeon bullet-hell roguelike, a potent blend of different ideas that sounds like it should have been a shambling, mismatched mess but wound up being a clean and polished experience of constant gunfights with often bizarre weapons.
0 kommentar(er)
