Gunpoint: Super Pants

Yep, more indie bullshit.  I'd apologize but I've been lacking the time required to play a big title all the way through yet.  There's a couple in the wings, but I keep getting distracted by mid week sales of indie games I've been waiting to play.  SO HERE'S THE REVIEW AND YOU'LL LIKE IT DAMN IT!

Gunpoint is an indie, 2D stealth puzzle platformer with a cyberpunk, neo-noir setting and story.  And it's just plain, good fun.

It reminds me a bit of Deus: Ex in the idea that you are a cyber enhanced stealth agent sent out to solve a murder.  The story is pretty good, I like the way it's written and the characters seem much more real than they tend to in mystery stories.  You get to make a lot of choices within the game as you try to find out what happened and the game even gives you the option to shoot yourself in the foot at a few moments.

The story revolves around a private contracting agent, named "Conway" (I swear this is a "game of Life" reference, but it never just comes out and tells you) with super pants that allow him to do super human stuff like jump entire buildings, survive long falls and be a general badass.  He's generally snarky and funny depending on what dialogue options you follow and is a likeable guy.

The game play is just lovely.  The 2D setting makes the puzzles tie really nicely with the stealth.  Of course, you can just try to do the whole thing ham fisted, but one shot from a guard will take you out, so the stealth way seems to be the best way.  The levels, up until near the end where they get much larger, can generally be contained within just one screen.

And it may seem that this would make the game too easy, but the puzzle element really sold me on this sort of view.  The puzzles revolve around your ability to remotely rewire circuits within a given building.  You get upgrades that allow you interact with secure circuits, provided you get to the junction box, and ones that allow you interact with more objects in the world, like guard's guns, for the price of consumable resources.

The puzzle and the stealth fit together very nicely.  They play off of each other and holy hell is it fun to set up a really complex trap and watch it go off seamlessly.  But the puzzles don't detract from the stealth gameplay and the stealth gameplay doesn't erase puzzles from the game.

The game is rather short, but it does allows you to replay previous missions for better ratings after you've completed the story and several of the levels are really going to test the skills you've learned, particularity the final level.  I think it took me 15-20 tries to figure it all out. I played through the whole thing in one sitting because it was just so engrossing and I wanted to see what was next.  And if that hasn't sold you on it, there's a level editor so there's essentially no end to the game, just an end to the story, which you can replay and find other endings or missions you missed the first time.  It's damn good.

I did not "fall", I "jumped" form that third story window...