Enter the Gungeon is a bullet hell roguelike video game developed by Dodge Roll and published by Devolver Digital. It follows four adventurers as they descend into the Gungeon to find a gun to kill their past. The game was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, and PlayStation 4 on April 5, 2016, on Xbox One on April 5, 2017, as well as on Nintendo Switch on December 14, 2017.
Gameplay
Enter the Gungeon is a fast-paced bullet hell shooter with roguelike elements, and is therefore often compared to The Binding of Isaac and Nuclear Throne. The player chooses one of four protagonists (more can be unlocked as the game progresses), all of whom have different special abilities, such as calling for support or lock picking chests. A second player is able to join in for co-op mode and control a fifth character. While the player descends the Gungeon, they are set to go through multiple floors, each with a random number of rooms in it. While the rooms are pre-defined, the constellation of rooms in a floor, the enemies that appear in the rooms, and treasure are procedurally generated. Each room contains a set of enemies, which vary in strength, endurance, and attack behavior, where the attack can range from simple, straightforward shots to a complicated mixture of shots fired at the same time. The player may dodge attacks by performing a dodge roll, which was inspired by the Souls series of video games, and are invulnerable during the action, or alternatively flip tables and use them as covers, although tables can be destroyed if they are shot at. The player has a limited number of "blanks" for each floor that can be used to eliminate all current projectiles and temporarily stun enemies. To defeat enemies, the player must use guns, which can be found in chests, won by defeating bosses, or bought at shops scattered around the floors in the Gungeon. The game features over 300 different guns and items that can be combined to achieve more powerful effects. At the end of each floor, a boss awaits the player; beating the boss grants the player a gun or item and currency to spend at shops and unlocks the next floor.
As the player progresses through multiple playthroughs, they may encounter non-player characters that can be rescued from the Gungeon. Once rescued, these characters take residence at the Breach, a safe level above the Gungeon, and where the player, prior to starting a new playthrough, can spend a type of in-game currency earned from boss fights to permanently unlock special items that will then have a chance of appearing within the Gungeon for all subsequent playthroughs. In the game's "A Farewell to Arms" update, a new game mode, Rainbow Mode, assures that each level will contain one rainbow colored chest with a collection of guns in it, but the player can only select one gun from those, and no other chests will be offered; this mode was inspired by self-regulated gameplay popularized within the game's community.
Plot
Enter the Gungeon is set in the Gungeon, an eldritch dungeon on a distant planet named Gunymede, inhabited by living bullets and other strange gun-related lifeforms. At an unspecified point in the past, a giant bullet from the sky destroyed a fortress, and its resulting magic created a weapon of legendary proportions: The Gun That Can Kill The Past. The fortress was rebuilt with the highest of security measures to guard the gun, and adventurers known as "gungeoneers" hailed from places over the galaxy to claim their chance at changing their past. The player can play as eight gungeoneers, each with their own stories and regrets, as they decide to enter the fortress and descend into the Gungeon to seek the legendary gun in order to defeat their past.
Development
Development on Enter the Gungeon started in 2014, with four Mythic Entertainment employees leaving the company to fulfill their own project just before the company would shut down later that year. According to developer Dave Crooks, he had been listening to the soundtrack to the game Gun Godz by Vlambeer, and the name "gungeon" came to him the next day. Crooks presented the name Enter the Gungeon to his fellow team members, and they fleshed out the game's lore over a lunch meeting and then spent the next few weeks to prototype the game mechanics. Though Crooks stated that The Binding of Isaac was one of the game's biggest influences, they also were influenced by Nuclear Throne, Spelunky, Dark Souls and Metal Gear Solid.
Dungeons in the game are generated in a procedural manner, but they found it was better to handcraft the individual rooms, playtesting those individually, and then using their random generation to connect these rooms into a dungeon. The designs of the guns took place over the two years of development, with most of the designs by team artist Joe Harty; several of the guns are inspired by other video games and video game systems, including the NES Zapper and guns similar to those appearing in games such as Mega Man, Metroid, Shadow Warrior and Serious Sam. The boss character designs were made by a combination of ideas from Crooks and Harty, which then fed into the gameplay programmer David Rubel to determine appropriate bullet hell patterns associated with that idea.
