Enter the Gungeon

I’m surprised there is no thread on this? Its a roguelike, that is one of the fastest selling games on Steam and the PS4 this past week.

Basically, its a roguelike where you shoot things, dodge, and if you die, start over. Its a randomly generated dungeon, with massive amounts of things do do and explore, and insane loot. A rifle that is also a lightsaber? Sure ., its there!

It can be played co-op, but only locally. Anyways, if roguelikes are your thing, you probably want to try this out.

Yeah, it’s a very solid roguelike.

That term has become so generic I don’t even know what it means. Difficult?

Permadeath, different classes, different monsters, randomized dungeons, tons of loot - basically, everything you expect from the term “roguelike”.

I expect turn-based. :)

I would argue that the only thing that most “roguelikes” have in common is permadeath, and maybe are random to a degree. Sword of Fargoal was a roguelike. Get off my lawn and all that.

I guess I think of Angband as the penultimate roguelike, and this game, besides not being turnbased, is basically like that. Kinda like diablo, only permadeath always, and with guns.

Let’s see how many threads we can fill up with discussions about the definition of “roguelike”! For me, it’s a dungeon crawler with permadeath, procedural levels, tiles, and turns.

This Gungeon game looks pretty great irrespective of genre but it will have to go on the wishlist for now, with Dark Souls so close.

“Roguelike” is kind of like labeling a title as a “strategy” game: You have Real Time and Turn Based flavors. It’s just another genre, no one gets concerned about the definition of a strategy game, after all.

I’ve been playing this for a few weeks now, it’s very cool and a lot of fun, but it’s a tough nut to get good at in my book. Maybe a little too hard; my interest was waning before it even launched.

But, there is very established label for these kind of games: “topdown shooter”. And this and Nuclear Throne are clearly topdown shooters. They just add random levels and different classes, so I think they are closer to topdown shooter with a bit of roguelike than roguelike with a bit of topdown shooter.
But of course “roguelike” is less a normal genre than really a certain style (procedural levels/worlds, hard-ish, very replayable) which can be applied to action games, rts games, rpg games…

But it implies games like FTL, Dwarf Fortress, and Enter the Gungeon are at all similar. They aren’t. There is almost nothing similar about them, other than maybe their difficultly level. In my head roguelike should mean games like the game Rogue, but I would bet the vast majority of gamers who use the phrase have never played that type of game, let alone know what type of game it was.

I can say I like strategy games, because it implies a certain type of game. I can’t say that about roguelikes because so many games are covered by the umbrella.

God, can we not go down this rabbit hole again?

It a fun game gawd, Lee. :P

I think it’s a little too hard to get going. My son who is great at all those darn Rayman games…really good at twitch gameplay… just got super annoyed playing this last night. Said it was too hard too soon.

I wish there was a bit more time once you enter a room to survey the layout and the baddies…I dont like constant shoot, strafe, roll…from the get go…give me a bit more time and not be so stressed.

I want to play again though and get better…a good sign.

Over 200,000 sold so far.

Man, just makes me wonder why Arcen could not catch this break with Starward Rogue.

Jeff Vogel has talked about it and some reject this line of thinking, but IMO there’s a lot of luck that goes into this. Now, I would argue that Gungeon’s art style is overall better, or more likely to produce a surprise hit, than Rogue’s. But it’s still a toss of the dice at the end of the day.

This reminds me I need to pick Rogue back up at some point (so much to play right now).

Fair or not Starward Rogue’s art style was a big turn off for me. I’ve also heard a lot more general buzz for Gungeon from people who liked what they saw at shows last year, plus having the Devolver Digital name attached can’t hurt.

We were recently having that discussion over in the roguelike thread if you don’t want to take this one down a tangent.

TL;DR: The broad modern usage of ‘roguelike’ communicates something useful and fundamental about all those games – that they are structured around repeated attempts at unique procedural arrangements of challenges and resources with all consequences being permanent, rather than the more common game paradigm of relatively steady progress through a single arrangement of content with the ability to save/reload or reset to checkpoints.

I can (and do) say that I like roguelikes because I like that structure, and the tension and variety it brings. It’s easier and more productive to make further distinctions with other words (‘classical roguelike’, ‘action roguelike’, ‘strategy roguelike’, etc.) than to swim against the tide of usage.

Guess I’m part of the problem, since I bought Enter the Gungeon right away, but just threw Starward Rogue on my wishlist. While the art style per se didn’t bother me, the movement in the trailer was definitely a turn-off, looking more like a mouse cursor being dragged around than anything with inertia. There was also an obvious difference in reviews showing up in my RSS feed, and the description was just cringeworthy:

A roguelite labyrinth lodged in the side of a star. Dodge gorgeous waves of bullets, claim weapons and upgrades, defeat The Warden, and rescue… Rodney?

Graphics sell, yeah. In this case, art. It’s the first wall to overcome to even have a chance to more mainstream success, having something that catches your eye.

The Starward Rogue name is pretty meh also - I don’t think that helped.