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I've talked about Enter The Gungeon a few times in this journal. Once when I was talking about the fact that I had only been watching the game in a First Impressions post, then another time when I started to play it for the first time. Since then, I've racked up a couple good hours into the game to come to the conclusion that the game is a damn fine release for this year. It's developed by a team by the name of Dodge Roll, and published by Devolver Digital, who is known for publishing games like Downwell, Hotline Miami, Broforce, and the list just goes on and on. Basically, they're pretty renowned as a pretty good publisher, and the games that have in their arsenal of published is pretty amazing.

What should you expect from Enter The Gungeon? Well, if you've played games like Binding of Isaac, or Nuclear Throne, or any type of bullet hell style game, you pretty much have Enter The Gungeon. But it gets much deeper than that. In most rogue like games, you'd expect some depth to them like weapon choices, synergies, fantastic level design, great music, and difficult bosses. Well, Enter The Gungeon delivers not only that, but much more than that. If you've played Enter The Gungeon before, you know all about the difficulty curve that the game throws at you from the start. I've probably talked about it a few times myself. Basically, the game is hard as ****, for good reason. When I play games like this, I do typically like them to be hard at first, because the satisfaction of progressing makes you feel like you have actually worked hard to get to that point. Pretty much the same goes for my time in Binding of Isaac. The more you play, the better you get. I think that could be the standard for rogue like games, but I could be wrong. And if I am wrong, well...that should be the standard for these types of games, because it feels great once you get to the point where you can say "yeah, i'm good at this game."

So yeah, Enter The Gungeon is tough. It's definitely one of the harder games I've picked up recently. I don't know if it's as hard or close to as hard as Darkest Dungeon, but both have their own difficulty curves which makes me want more. With the toughness though comes the satisfaction of what I mentioned before, the variety. You can find a variety of different weapons ranging from a squirt gun, to a gun that shoots bees at your enemies. Of course, finding out whether those guns are good or not is all up to you using those guns and seeing how far you can get to them. The other thing this game adds and it's something I really like, and it adds to it's difficult curve, is how little the game helps you along the way. For example, you could go through a whole run (and runs typically take up to an hour, if you're good enough at the game to get to the end boss), and you could easily not get one single ammo drop, or one key to open a chest, or whatever. You get plenty of money though so that's where it equals it out. So, if you've played gun games before and you're not used to conserving your ammo, you better get used to it, because if not, you're screwed in the end game.

At the end of the day, Enter The Gungeon is a fantastic game, and definitely one worthy of being in this list as well as being a shining moment in the rogue like genre altogether. Dodge Roll have done something amazing, and I sincerely hope they continue the streak of developing amazing games, because they really know how to do it. I look forward to seeing where this developer goes, and if they take off into another genre, I hope they stick with how difficult they make games, because the difficulty again is a big part of why I enjoy this game so much. And do pick it up for yourself if you're interested, I guarantee you will get that feeling of "man I want to play this game right now" feeling right away.