Enter the Gungeon review

 

It took me a minute to get around to reviewing this game for a couple of very good reasons. The first is that Enter the Gungeon's style of roguelike bullet-hell action is teetering on the edge of being straight-up malicious, which made getting through it take a while. The second is that I learned to love this game's uncompromising design to the point that I had a hard time putting it down to write about it.   This is a game that relishes in messing with you while also rewarding you for learning how to put up with its hijinks, and if you have the patience to do that I can't recommend Enter the Gungeon enough.

Old reliable

At the time of its original release in 2016, I think it's fair to say that Enter the Gungeon's roguelike dungeon-crawling design was still fairly novel. This was a time before the likes of Dead Cells, Hades, and even Slay the Spire existed. In the time since then, plenty of other games beyond the aforementioned have come out and added to or simply derived from the basic formula of mixing and matching procedurally generated modifiers and level designs and asking players to leverage those to make it through challenging stages under the threat of permadeath.

Enter the Gungeon's specific flavor of this revolves around guns, both in terms of the arsenal at your disposal but also to a ridiculous degree when it comes to the dungeon you enter itself, the enemies you face, and the items you encounter. Using fairly standard twin-stick shooter controls, your goal is to proceed through five floors of this "Gungeon" to find a gun that can "kill the past."

Ammo ambush

What makes Enter the Gungeon a standout title playing it now in 2025 is not the general concept or the satisfaction of the gunplay (though those are perfectly fine) but rather the amount of mystery and knowledge embedded in the game that is barely addressed and you are left to uncover on run after run. Secret floors with ridiculous unlock methods, enemies you might not enounter for the first 50 runs, secret rooms with no hint at where they might be, and more await you each time you play the game. Even now after completing a successful run after dozens and dozens of attempts I am finding new things.

What makes these discoveries all the more surprising is how they aren't all beneficial to you. In fact, the likelihood that any given new thing you encounter will be a boon to you is quite low, and even the stuff that does grant you a leg up doesn't suddenly make a given run significantly easier.

What it does instead is add dimension and dynamism to each run such that they truly never feel similar. It also helps that repeated play tends to lead to your own skills getting sharper, so finding things that add some challenge or wrinkle to your plans then also gives you the pleasure of finding new levels of difficulty to encounter and overcome.

Pulling the trigger

As a mobile port, Enter the Gungeon runs perfectly fine, though its design lends itself best to playing it with a controller (I can't imagine someone beating it using the touch controls). As a free-to-start game, you can also determine for yourself if dodging through layers of bullets feels comfortable enough on a smaller screen to unlock the full experience for $ 8.99.

If you do end up paying for the game, just know that Enter the Gungeon rewards patience and skill-building. On my first several attempts it didn't seem within the realm of possibility for me to reach even the midpoint of the gungeon reliably, but eventually I developed a better sense of how to dodge roll effectively, when to use blanks, how to best use weapons and items, etc. and now each run has the final boss well within reach, though things can always go sideways and end my runs prematurely.

The bottom line

There have been many times when playing Enter the Gungeon that I have laughed or yelled upon seeing something ridiculous suddenly happen that delights as much as it frustrates.

Regardless of whether I actually live through these surprises (I often don't), the fact that they can and do keep happening on run after run is what keeps me coming back to it even after seeing the credits roll. This game is a wonderful and devilish experience, and I hate it but I also love it so much.

Screw this game, but also: you should probably play it.