I just finished Tom Francis’s Gunpoint, a game so indie that Tom basically made it himself in the last three years, but which my friend Chris really liked. Only Chris is friends with Tom, so maybe he’s lying.
No, it really is a good game. You may have seen screenshots, or a demo. It looks like this. My character is in the middle of the picture, in the trenchcoat, all of 35 pixels high.
I worried that the art might seem horribly retro, but actually it makes sense, because it’s a puzzle game, you see, and you need to see the whole building you’re dealing with.
You are a freelance spy. In the game, I mean– I don’t know what you do in real life. You witness a murder, and this involves you in a series of missions, all of which involve infiltrating a building and stealing or hacking something deep inside.
The neat bit is that Tom has come up with a truly novel and fun game mechanic. You can rewire the building’s electronics systems, in insane ways. Anything on a circuit can be wired to anything else, so you can have switches open doors, motion detectors turn off lights, and elevator panels open trapdoors.
If you screw up, you’re offered the chance to reload an autosave from several seconds ago, which is almost always enough to undo whatever didn’t work and try something else.
You can scroll the view with the arrow keys, but switching to hacking mode will move it, and occasionally the arrow keys don’t work…. this is annoying because 80% of the time (that is, until the last few large maps), you want the damn building centered and stable, and it won’t stay that way.
The ending is… abrupt. There’s a whole subplot with the chief of police that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Plus I went through the final level in the only way I could figure out, which was violently. The story wrap-up was, well, nonexistent, so I have no idea if that was a good idea, or if there was an alternative, or what happened next, or why my character didn’t end up in jail.
The game took me about six hours, which is probably about right for the price. It reminds me a lot of Portal 1– not that it feels similar to play, but it’s the same combination of a fun and new game mechanic with an often amusing story to link the puzzles together.
Last time I’d played “low chaos but kill the targets”, so finding the nonlethal ways through the missions involved some new material. I do think Dunwall is fun to explore, far more fun than fighting through it– though it’s been established that it’s such a nasty place that I’m not convinced that placing an eleven-year-old on the throne will greatly improve it. For Dishonored 2, we have to ask, could the city get any worse? Never doubt it! I mean, I’m sure they’ll come up with something, but it’s hard to feel that the place is worth saving.