Stealth games come and go. Many get it wrong, some get it right, and far fewer-like Gunpoint-make us giggle. And why shouldn’t it? It all begins with main character Richard Conway acquiring a new pair of jumping boots for use in his freelance investigator job, accidentally jumping out of his apartment window, crashing through plate glass on a nearby building, and being wrongfully accused of a murder that just so happened to occur at exactly the same time.
Of course, before any of this sinks in, I first noticed that I was immediately fond of the visuals. There isn’t a lot to say about them, and so to get it out of the way, Gunpoint is in essence a 2D platformer relying on sprites to get the job done. Unlike many other pixely-type games, there is no upscaling present; what you select as your resolution is what you get. This means that if you play at too high a resolution, you might find yourself reaching for a magnifying glass to see some of the game’s finer points. This isn’t necessarily a huge issue, but it’s worth mentioning. Beyond that, the sprite work is solid and Richard’s animations are smooth and flowy.
The object of the game is to take freelance infiltration jobs, mostly to clear your name but also to make cash on the side and help a few other people with problems of their own. The response options for the text conversations before being sent on a job are often funny, and at many points in the game you can even try to tell the truth to essentially self destruct, only to find out later that things have conveniently turned in your favor anyways. All of these missions involve breaking into a building and either finding a central computer, or stealing something. There are optional objectives to find laptops, however the graphics for laptops are very poorly visible. They often get lost in the backdrop and can be impossible to see without scanning your mouse over every inch of every room, which sucks as you’ll see at the end of every job how many laptops there were and how many you got. I must say I felt cheated when I saw I missed a laptop, and yet there were clearly no visible laptops in the building.
Gunpoint is not necessarily your standard stealth game, and the tools Richard can use to clear his name are as numerous as they are odd. Rather than slinking through shadows or hiding in boxes, most of your dashing maneuvers are performed by crashing through windows and using the Crosslink. The Crosslink is what I consider to be the game’s focal point, and allows you to rewire any electrical device in a building to any other device. Don’t want a guard to be able to close a door? Snip the wires going from a palm scanner to its connected door. Want to set up an elaborate and nonsensical domino effect whereby flipping a light switch opens up every single door in the building and shuts off all the lights, before cutting the wire and watching as the guards all helplessly try to figure out what’s going on? That’s fun too.
The Crosslink is upgradeable, and comes alongside numerous other upgrades, such as enhancing your jump boots’ charge rate or jumping power. It’s a fun little system that allows you to spend your earned cash improving yourself, however it all feels slightly superfluous as it seems that nearly every upgrade is eventually required to complete a level, and you’ll find you conveniently have the correct amount of cash to buy these upgrades as soon as you need them, and so while it’s technically your choice to choose what to upgrade, it sometimes doesn’t feel that way.
This leads to another problem; by the time I had gotten my final upgrade and finished the final job, I had realized that Gunpoint was agonizingly short, running only 3-4 hours. You can of course go back and try to A+ previous missions, and the story never felt rushed, but it was a shame that there weren’t more branching mission arcs just to add a few more hours to this fun game. Although a level editor is present, it doesn’t appear to allow you to create your own mission arcs complete with sarcastically fun text conversations, and so the driving force behind playing them is dulled, making playing custom levels feel a bit soulless.
On the whole, Gunpoint is a great game, and if you like to suction cup yourself to the side of buildings and engage in frequent laughter, you can’t really go wrong. If you can’t justify the $10 price though for what is an extremely short experience, that’s also understandable.
