Gunpoint

Gunpoint is best described as a point and click puzzle game, at least that’s how I played it. You take on the role of a freelance detective investigating the murder of someone you may or may not know, but are heavily implicated in the murder of. I was drawn to this game through its trailer marketing it as an action/puzzle/shooter in which you could approach each level in a multitude of ways, combining a few basic mechanics to make involved and interesting gameplay decisions. That and the Suspicious Games bundle was on sale on Steam for cheaper than I was going to buy Heat Signature by itself.

Having completed the story, I don’t feel there are as many options as the trailer would have you believe; each mission seems to give you the option of going in “all guns blazing” or taking a stealth approach to it, but once you’ve made that decision the solution to each mission seems to be fairly linear. That said, I opted for a stealth approach in my playthrough and I am tempted to give it another go taking a louder approach this time (and picking up those last few achievements on route). I’ve only clocked 5 hours of gameplay according to Steam, which is both a boon and a detriment to the game – on the one hand, any longer and I feel the mechanics could have become stale, essentially working through the same few puzzles built in slightly different ways; but on the other hand, full price Gunpoint is £6, which falls short of a personal “£1/hour” rule I have. Though I must caveat that as I got it in a sale I’m well within that rule, and if I do go for a second run-through I’ll be below that anyway.

As it is, I felt the game was a suitable length, the story was interesting but didn’t overcomplicate or try to overreach itself, and the game as a whole has left me satisfied and considering whether I want a helping of seconds or if I should just be content that I’m no longer hungry but also not stuffed.

My biggest gripe with the game would be that whilst enjoying a methodical approach to the puzzles, I was still occasionally thrown into a quick-time-event style moment to avoid certain guards. Most of the time this was just a case of timing my runs with the patrol routes, but on the occasion they had a short patrol right where the objective was (making them unavoidable) and the options were either knock out the guard (something I was trying to avoid) or very quickly grab the objective and hope my jump for cover was out of the sight line of the guard. Still, these moments were infrequent enough that it didn’t really spoil my enjoyment of the game; the games autosave and quick load features (questions about immersion aside) were very useful in making these moments not feel too punishing for my choice in play style.

My only other significant gripe was when it came to some dialogue decisions. As has become popular semi-recently, the “your decisions matter” comes into effect in Gunpoint during conversations before or after most missions. Whilst most of these are a stylistic choice of how you want to play the character, a few of these do impact the story (it’s pretty obvious when they do) and – without going into spoilers – some of these decisions could have consequences for you. My gripe here is that, since I played it over several sittings, I couldn’t remember how I had completed certain missions (most significantly, and this is only a minor spoiler, whether I had been seen on camera during certain previous missions), meaning I had to look up other gameplay videos of the missions and work out what I had done. This was probably overkill and didn’t actually impact the story, but in a game that wants to be taken seriously I felt like I needed to be as true as I could to how I was playing the character.

Overall, Gunpoint is a fun, quick, and clever game which hits a nice point of being very satisfying without requiring a heavy time investment, and whilst there are a few places it could be improved (the “upgrade” system for example) there’s little I would change about the gameplay. You can think as little, or as much, as you would like with it and still have a good time. I would recommend this game to anyone looking for a game to fill a gap, it’s not a long-term investment, but it ticks pretty much all the short-term boxes.

• Gameplay – 8/10
• Mechanics – 9/10
• Story – 8/10
• Price – 5/10
• Enjoyment* – 8/10

OVERALL – 7.6/10

*Enjoyment is a personal measure of how much I enjoyed the game, more of a “gut feeling” than the empirical approach I try to take with the other ratings.