Gunpoint Review: Short Grift, Long Con

Tom Francis is a writer. He’s been one for quite some time, having spent more than a few years as an editor over at PC Gamer. As a consequence of such a profession, he has probably played and forgotten about more games in his career than you’ve thought about buying in your entire life. He’s likely encountered trash that you would look at and assume it came from a box of cereal. He’s found gems so far off the radar that convincing anyone to give them a go would be like asking someone to give you their foot.

He also made a game. After teaming up with a couple artists and a few musicians, Francis made Gunpoint, a 2D stealth game about a freelance spy named Richard Conway. After being found in some less-than-desirable circumstances that would lead the authorities to believe he killed a woman (he didn’t), Conway gets caught up in some Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest level of backstabbing and flimsy loyalties. Aside from an above average talent for casual snark, Conway is just a regular dude who dies from single bullet wounds. But he does have a pair of hypertrousers that allow him to jump super high and fall from any height as well as a thing called a Crosslink, a device that allows him to rewire pretty much any piece of electronics.

It’s worth noting that Francis is a games journalist because Gunpoint is—if nothing else—a streamlined experience. It screams of the tastes of a man who has played so many video games now that cutting away the cruft in his own game seems like the only sane thing to do. Your mission briefs are short and to the point and yet still totally skippable at the press of a button; rather than committing to any particular upgrade and forcing you to grind for more money, you can simply refund those that you don’t want to buy the ones you do; and death is nothing more than a mouse click-sized speed bump on your way to the end. After years of being forced to watch cutscenes and listening to NPCs teach you how to use new techniques and devices and find discrete save points before quitting, Francis saw fit to rectify all that in Gunpoint.

Which makes the sentiment that those decisions are a shame quite odd. There’s just so much to like about Gunpoint that shortening it to a three-hour experience seems wasteful. First off, the writing is genuinely entertaining. All of the dialogue takes place in little text speech bubbles and smartphone chat, the latter of which allows you to choose response options and recap the case file. Conway can often choose between agreeable, frank, and sardonic dialogue options, all of which lean into painting a rather interesting portrait of man who loves trenchcoats and espionage. The story itself can get a bit loose and becomes somewhat unraveled towards the end, but the act of ingesting it plenty of fun.

The music is also superb, though it feels a bit disjointed. This seems like the inevitable end to working with three different composers for the game, but the individual elements are still good ear candy. There is smooth and sleek old school spy jazz going on in some parts (in what might best be described as “smoky”) and there is excellent upbeat, frenetic music in others, but none of that or anything in between feels like part of a cohesive aural whole. It’s still good, though, and maybe worth downloading from Bandcamp.

As for the gameplay, Gunpoint is easier to talk about because it is unequivocally good. You move about with WASD, but they also provide contextual use for interacting with your environment, so hacking, going up and down stairs and elevators, and generally doing things is easy and intuitive in the same way just holding your stick towards your objective in Monaco: What’s Yours is Mine felt right. Holding down your left mouse button allows you to charge your super jump and reveals a trajectory arc similar to what you would see when you throw a grenade in a first-person shooter. Doing so affords you the ability to jump up and cling to walls and ceilings, tackle guards before punching them in the face, and diving into and out of windows like a badass.

Save for the punching part (and using guns, once you can get your hands on one), all of that is vital to getting around the game, but only one thing could possibly trump locomotion as a requisite utility: the Crosslink. It’s a device you can buy that allows you to flick up on your mouse wheel to highlight all the electronics in any given level and allows you to connect them as you so desire. So if you want to make it so a hand scanner opens a door that knocks out a guard, you can do that. If you want to turn off a light and then make it so its switch electrocutes anyone who turns it on, you can do that, too. It’s a wonderful system that allows you to poke and prod at a system of interacting rules and objects that appeals to your inner rulebreaker and tinkerer more than anything.

The rolling autosave feature plays into this idea; you’re never further than five, 10, and 15 seconds away from correcting a mistake and optimizing your run (better stealth ratings regarding violence, noise, etc. impact your rating and your earned monetary commission). This, however, makes the game feel egregiously easy. Well, this and the fact that everything like store and upgrade refunds and how towards the latter third of the game, the choices you make within the level feel a lot more linear and far less experimental. It got to the point where I kind of questioned why even bother putting so much thought into elegant solutions when quick, brute force ploys would work just as well. And at three hours of gameplay, that is a total shame.

It’s also a waste because I feel like so much more can be done with what Gunpoint has thus far set up with its systemic methodology of stealth and game world alterations. By the time Conway’s interesting but ultimately confusing story wraps up, you feel like the game is just barely scratching the surface of what is possible and what results can be achieved with further experimentation in level design. However, the level editor seems well suited for others to delve into that.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a games writer, too, that I enjoy what Tom Francis & co. (though he solo’d the design, writing, and programming aspects) has created in Gunpoint. It’s a facilitated experience in ways that I find more agreeable than unfortunate, though the consequences of a quick and breezy run may rub you the wrong way harder than they did me. But the individual components, including a great look and fascinating gameplay hook, are irrefutably good, and I happen to find the end product greater than the sum of its parts. So go play Gunpoint why don’t ya.

+ A great but disjointed package of sights and sounds
+ The interactions with the world make sense and the hypertrouser jump is endlessly entertaining
+ Crosslinking things to make guards do dumb things and make me look like a god damn genius is great
– It might come across as too easy and too short for some people
– The story gets muddled in its latter half and results in me totally not caring about its conclusion

Final Score: 8 out of 10

Game Review: Gunpoint
Release: June 3, 2013
Genre: Side-scrolling stealth action
Developer: Suspicious Developments
Available Platforms: PC
Players: 1
MSRP: $9.99
Website: http://www.gunpointgame.com/

Systemic Joy in Gunpoint

Rules are a funny thing. For all our dependencies on rules, they are often shirked for the better. Laws are overlooked when they impede progress, regulations are broken when they’re frivolous, and cheating can be pretty fun. Fire trucks run red lights when there are some flames that need quelling, permits for yard sales are largely pointless, and you just got away with taking two cards off the top of the deck instead of just one. Rules are made to be grabbed, smashed, and thrown out the window.

Which is pretty much exactly what Richard Conway does, the protagonist of Gunpoint. Gunpoint is a 2D stealth action game from Pentadact, aka Tom Francis of PC Gamer, and a team of artists and musicians. In it, Richard dons a pair of superpowered pants that enable him to jump really fucking high and fall without any physical consequences. This means he can launch up three stories into a room and tackle a guard all the way down to the ground before getting up and dusting himself off just to do it again.

Oh yeah, there are guards. Richard is a freelance spy who, after a botched job, finds himself embroiled in an ever maddening web of deceit and general trouble. He has to infiltrate offices, bases, and labs as he attempts to suss out where things went wrong.

The most notable thing about Richard, though, is that he has this thing called a Crosslink, a device that enables him to see all of the electronics in a level and, well, link them across each other. So light switches, motion sensors, automatic doors, cameras, and so many other things are at the mercy of Richard and his desires.

Or rather, your desires. Gunpoint is a game all about testing the rules and then systematically breaking them. You play from a broad view where the entire level (or most of it) is within frame, so you can see where everyone and everything is at any given moment. This affords you the most information possible to help you decide when and where to do what and to what end. You can hook up a light switch to a door so it opens instead of a light coming on, but what if the door was on the bottom floor and the switch was at the top? The wide, holistic perspective informs you of why you might want to do this.

Instead of seeing how two dominoes react (i.e. one falls into the other), now you can see how the entire scheme is put together. You can orchestrate elaborate plans of never subduing or encountering a guard while they simply incapacitate or distract each other. Or you can put them all down at once and then saunter through the building like a Rockefeller. Pulling out from a localized view to a global one is key to Gunpoint‘s allure; you can see all the gears turning, but now you get to find out why they turn.

That appeals to our inner rule breaker. This shouldn’t be confused with a sense of rebellion and breaking things because we can (though that is some of the appeal, too). No, it’s because we’re curious. More than any other feeling, curiosity fuels our every action and subsequent emotion. Your desire to poke at things and find out what happens when you poke them drives our love, our anger, and our everything. Being content is dangerous, so Gunpoint made sure to surface everything you would need to never be content.

For instance, some games have similar systemic ties that open the door to testing the boundaries of interaction and possibility. Most stealth games, in fact, fall under this umbrella. But they can be punishing and lack checkpoints or force you to commit to decisions that you wish you could take back. Gunpoint, on the other hand, has an autosave feature that kicks in every few seconds. When you die, you go back no further than two or three seconds, or you can opt to go a few steps further back and really find out where your tree branches. There is absolutely no punishment for dying or for experimenting. Feel free to try every variable and run every trial. This is an open lab for your testing pleasure.

There is some funneling that takes place, though, directing you to understanding that this is the purpose of the game. Richard’s deaths, which are numerous and rapid, are unceremonious. His death receives about as much fanfare as someone sitting down in a chair. It’s quick and nigh imperceptible, much like a trademark Family Guy pratfall. It gets and deserves so little recognition because that’s not the point of the game; the point is for you to move moment to moment between setting up the trap and springing it.

The simplicity of which you can cause mayhem and tragedy is also important. Complexity is what appeals to us because it gives us more folds to uncover and more details for us to discover on our own, but complication befuddles us and makes us want to quit, to walk away and never look back. Gunpoint is complex in that it has many very simple systems all interacting with one another, but the interactions you take with it and the rules that it abides by are binary. Either a guard sees you or he does; either the light is on or it is off; the door is open or it’s closed. Instead of turning dials and moving sliders, you flip a switch between stop and go, something so simple that we made a game out of it for kids to play on a playground.

This exposes the bare elements of the endeavor. For the kids running around on the field, it then becomes about reaction time and physical speed, two things that even five-year-olds can keep in mind. For Richard running around in Gunpoint, knowing simply whether something is active or inactive, on or off, is quick and easy to discern and makes watching the system run after you seed and manipulate the input all the more fascinating.

That’s what makes breaking the rules of Gunpoint fun. You operate within a framework that supersedes the rules established for doors, lights, guards, and whatnot and allows you explore what it means to cheat a system. Get two guards caught in an infinite loop of turning on lights, get allies to electrocute each other, and get to breaking those rules. That is, after all, what we were made to do.