Gunpoint

The Rad

• Cool retro visuals.
• Rad, smooth jazz soundtrack
• Challenging puzzles.
• Funny writing

The Bad

• Uhm…. Uhhh…. It’s a little short, I guess?

Gunpoint is a stealth puzzler that puts you in the high-tech trenchcoat of a spy tasked with infiltrating various buildings and stealing various files in a wittily written, noir-esque tale.

I like stealth games! I totally SUCK at puzzle games.

And Gunpoint is probably more the latter than the former.

That being said whilst I found a lot of the levels rather challenging, I never felt like it was just over my head. I knew if I banged my head against a level long enough I’d sooner or later figure out a solution. And I did.

There’s a fair bit going on mechanically - you have a whole host of different abilities and upgrades that you’ll buy along the way.

For one, you can jump really far. You don’t take fall damage either.

Everyone else does though, which you can use to your advantage.

For instance, you can pounce at guys and in doing so throw them and yourself from rooftops. Killing them, but leaving you unscathed! Your jump can be upgrades to increase distance and power, useful for both traversing the environment and taking out foes.

Your main and most used ability, the one that makes this more a puzzle game than a stealth game, is the ability to hack pretty much anything in a building and make it do another thing .Or nothing at all. For instance a camera might be linked to an alarm, so if you get seen by said camera the alarm will go off and alert the guards to your presence.

But you can unlink the camera from the alarm to safely scoot on by the camera without fear. Or you can link the camera to something else. Like say, the power socket that guard is standing next to - so that when you walk in front of the camera the guard is quietly shocked and killed.

There’s a whole host of different things to link together to accomplish a variety of different tasks and you’ll need to get quite creative in some instances to make progress. It can be extremely challenging, but super rewarding when you figure out a cool, creative solution to whatever roadblocks you've encountered.

The campaign ran me a good three hours, which for a $10 game I don’t feel is all that bad. There’s also a level editor and while it isn’t in there now Steam workshop support is planned so that’ll make finding extra content a bit easier - though I’m sure if you do a little digging even now you’ll find s’more levels to pad out the length a bit.

But I didn't personally have a problem with the length.

It was a short and sweet game, that gave you a lot to do but not enough time to get tired of doing it. I generally prefer longer games but at the very least, Gunpoint doesn't wear out its welcome and while it lasts it’s a hell of a lot of fun.