Gunpoint

Gunpoint is exactly my kind of game – the growing genre I’ve come to call action puzzlers. This includes games like Portal, Qube, and Antichamber; basically games where the player takes on more of a hands on role in completing the puzzle (level), such as triggering buttons to unlock doors by standing on them, or stepping in front of a camera which is now connected to an electrical outlet (instead of an alarm) in order to shock a guard. Gunpoint does have a unique take on the genre (see the latter half of the previous example) which all the more contributes to it being such a good game.

The way the puzzles in Gunpoint work (i.e. the fundamental mechanics of the game) involve both direct character action and some clever level manipulation. Your goal in each level is to reach some computer terminal or similar item, get the goods, and get out. This is made more difficult by pesky obstacles, such as locked doors, armed guards, or heights. Therefore you’re looking at things like stealthily navigating a level to avoid getting shot by guards, going in fists blazing and punching everyone you can, or using a set of tools you’ll unlock over time to, say, jump through a window 3 stories up in order to bypass the security system on the first floor.

 

Bulky guards are tricky because you can't knock them out with a door, but professionals are deadly even in the dark why not.

The other part of the game involves manipulating the level to do your bidding. You see, you’ll gain access to a device that allows you to change the way electrical circuits interact with each other. When you activate this mode, you’ll see the way everything is connected, such as the light switch that will, predictably, turn the lights on and off, the camera or motion sensor that is connected to a noisy alarm that will attract guards, or the palm scanner that will open a secure door. Then you get to change them. Rewire a motion detector on the first floor to shut off the lights on the second, then laugh as the second floor guard attempts to use the palm scanner to open a door and get back to the switch he believes will once again illuminate his area, only to instead find out the palm scanner no longer triggers the door, but the other palm scanner, causing the door to open towards him instead of away, and thus knocking him out without you having to lift a finger. Connect the call button on an elevator, which can be an input that brings the elevator to that floor or an output that triggers something else (it also makes a noise, which itself can trigger other sensors) to an electrical outlet, then enjoy watching the guard on that floor be electrocuted just as your elevator arrives.

To be fair, electrical circuit manipulation is really the heart of the game, as it’s how you go about taking care of guards or accessing restricted areas. However, even though you can do it remotely from anywhere in the level, successfully moving around the level requires more than just shutting off all the lights. You can’t kill or render unconscious every guard with a door, special guards can see in the dark, and noisy actions such as breaking glass will summon guards from nearby floors. Furthermore, as you progress through the game, you’ll find that there are levels with several dedicated circuits, all color coded so you know what interacts with what, and the only way to manipulate them is to physically hack into a control box, usually located in some secure area patrolled by a guard.

The game’s difficult increases substantially when multiple circuits are involved.

The strategies you’ll develop to deal with these situations will depend on your personality. Over the course of the last few years I’ve found I prefer stealth over the “kill them all” approach, so I continued that in this game. Thus, when it came to character upgrades (new technologies you can purchase with your reward payment gathered at the end of each mission), I focused on things such as landing silently or the ability to jump through glass windows without making a sound, versus more combat oriented upgrades like the ability to occasionally dodge bullets or the acquisition of a gun called “The Resolver.” Combining those with tactics like shutting of the lights to leave (most) enemies blind or at least getting them to patrol rather than stand in one place, using the *ding* of an elevator remotely trigged to come to a floor to cause a guard to turn away from the stairs, and the occasional pounce plus a one punch knockout on a guard (with enough punches you can kill the guard, which means at the end of the level you’ll score better in the witnesses area, but worse in noise) resulted in some pretty good scores for me, though I always was lacking in the quickness department. Still, for me it made for an interesting challenge, one punctuated by plenty of do-overs as I found I was too slow crawling along a wall, or a jump from a certain height made too much noise, or just some other situation where I otherwise caught the attention of a guard I didn’t want to know where I was and who, in the end, turned out to be quite proficient with his firearm. Thankfully there’s this handy feature that, upon death, give you the option to roll the game back to various points (usually something like 3 seconds, 12 seconds, 21 seconds, or restart), to see if this time you can jump out of a guard’s line of sight fast enough.

There are plenty of upgrades in this game, though it's pretty easy to break them down into stealth vs. not stealth.

Not only is the gameplay lots of fun, particularly when you get into some of the later levels where you have more tools and more complicated puzzles – on the tools side you can route a power outlet to any other device, such as that switch that guard is going to try when you shut off the lights, thus causing that to shock the guard into unconsciousness, while the puzzles evolve to creating chain reactions where timing is important or to cleverly set something up across multiple independent circuits, usually involving something like an alarm or elevator chime triggering a sound sensor – Gunpoint is also one of the most well written games I’ve played in a while. This is not a serious, moving game a la Spec Ops: The Line, despite what the detective noir facade it puts up. No, Gunpoint is pure humor. It contrasts the previously discussed façade with the realities of a somewhat bumbling detective who, depending on your text choices when responding during mission briefings, is one degree or another of a smart mouth. Take the first few levels for example, which you can access in the game’s demo (to be completely honest, it was the demo that convinced me this was a game worth getting…for the right price). You immediately find yourself having to erase all evidence that implicates you in a murder you didn’t commit. While this is serious sounding, you’re actually contracted for the job by the woman whose security systems picked you up. This leads to plenty of opportunities to joke about have 4 backups, the ease with which you’re breaking into her facilities, how she can’t do it herself, and so on. The humor doesn’t add anything to the game in the sense that it changes the outcome, but I found myself laughing more than a few times at the dialogue tree I managed to construct.

The story does involve competition between two rival companies, murder, people being framed for that murder, bribed, etc. Serious stuff, but the dialogue choices make light of the situation.

Gunpoint is not a game without its downsides. The most notable is its short length. I made it through the whole thing using stealth tactics in under 3 hours. Replay wise, other than going back for some achievements that actually do depend on what you say or your chosen method for completing the final level, there’s not much of a reason to go back. As it was, going the whole ghost/ninja route I managed to just about get an A+ rating on every level, of which there are only 20 or so, and you’ll be through the majority of those before the difficult feels like it starts increasing. Thankfully the creator of this game, in an act that I find both genius and incredibly lazy, included Steam support for custom levels, so you can just hop on and find some new content to keep you busy.

All in all I’d say Gunpoint is a good game that’s worth getting, but certainly not at the full price of $10, particularly considering the brevity of this game. I’d recommend it at the 75% or so that games eventually always seem to hit on a major Steam sale (I received it as part of a Humble Bundle that a friend bought me, which is even better). You should jump on it at that price though, because what you do get makes for a solid experience – 8 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 8/10

Suggested Price: $2.49

***

For more Gunpoint, , check out this collection of screenshots otherwise unused in this review. Click on any one for a larger image. 

Surgeon Simulator 2013

So, Surgeon Simulator 2013 is a game I had heard about a few times, all concerning either how humorous or how difficult it is. When I saw it hit the $2.50 mark during a Steam sale, I figured I’d finally give this QWOP game a try and see if there is really anything to it, or if it’s just some gigantic practical joke. Turns out I was a bit surprised at just what the game has to offer.

As I mentioned, Surgeon Simulator is a QWOP game. For those of you that don’t know, that’s a reference to the game QWOP, in which you raced a track runner by using the Q, W, O, and P keys to control the upper and lower halves of each leg. The key to the game was incredible coordination and timing. That, and not pounding your keyboard into pieces as a result of the frustration such a control system breeds. Surgeon Simulator utilizes a similar system, where you control the five fingers of the one available hand with five keys (I toyed with the defaults, but ended up using A, W, E, F, and Space). This is combined with mouse movements and the two mouse buttons to give you position, elevation (M1), tilt (M2 + forward/backwards), and rotation (M2 + left/right). The result is a pretty versatile system where you can grab items by using the correct fingers (usually index and thumb), shake organs lose from their bonds (this is particularly funny when removing a brain), and generally have just enough control to make a terrible mess of things.

Finding something that works for you is key in this game. You can even switch hands if you're a lefty.

Somehow you’re supposed to master these controls enough to successfully perform a number of operations in varying conditions. The three basic operations are, in order, a heart, double kidney, and brain transplant. You must complete one to advance to the next. Once you make it through all three you’ll unlock a second set that takes place in the back of an ambulance. Complete those and you’ll unlock a set of zero g space operations. You’ll also unlock some additional special operations if you’re thorough enough to mess around on the menu screen/desk area that the game loads up and a few other places, such as an über heart transplant on The Heavy from Team Foretress 2 (you actually take on the role of The Medic in that one).

Operations can range from simple to pretty difficult, though that is largely due to the setting, because trying to avoid slicing your patient to death with a laser is a bit more difficult when the ambulance you’re in hits a large bump. For the basic heart transplant, which is the first level you’ll have access to, you must break open the rib cage, remove the lungs, cut the heart free from all the valve connections, and place a new heart in the same location. Removing the esophagus helps, because the heart is somewhat behind that. Tools such as a hammer, bone saw, laser (though not in this first level), are great things for breaking bones, while kidney knifes, scalpels, and scissors are made for slicing the connections that hold organs in place. However, all those tools are also more than perfect for inadvertently stabbing your patient in the gut, organs, and any other number of places that will cause a bit of blood loss and bleeding, which will eventually cause the patient to die, and you to fail the mission.

Using a bone saw as a hammer to smash away a skull is probably not the best idea, but it does work.

If you have a patient that is bleeding profusely, you can utilize a nice little item to save yourself from failure. The green syringe will stanch the bleeding, though multiple stabbings may be required if the blood loss rate is particularly high. Just be careful, because touching the needle of the green syringe will cause you to hallucinate, making completing the surgery a bit more difficult. The blue syringe can cure you, but don’t prick the patient with this one, otherwise you’ll be in trouble. In a similar game altering experience, you might want to avoid sticking anything in the power socket, otherwise you’ll have to suffer having your mouse movements reversed. In keeping with the joke like nature of this game, there is actually an achievement for completing a level after being electrocuted, while suffering the drug trip from touching the green syringe, and both at the same time. Oddly enough, I found it the easiest to complete all of these while performing brain surgery…

Other achievements make up challenges that range from improving your performance, such as getting a high score on every mission, to the comical, like finishing a brain surgery by throwing the brain into the skull like it’s a basketball. Completing an operation with a minimal time frame or with minimal blood loss are some of the more serious and difficult achievements, as well as key to achieving a high score, and while they are something you can complete at the same time, minimal blood loss requires precision while minimal time can be accomplished by taking a hammer and smashing out the rib cage or skull in a single hit (that’s about half the total blood right there) dicing up organs with a bone saw, and throwing the heart in the generally correct area with 10 ml of blood to spare.

Got a ton of achievements on my first Double Kidney Transplant in an Ambulance, including minimal blood loss and speed. Funny thing is I never managed to get these for the regular operation.

The control system is the “difficult” thing about this game, and aside from achievements to do things quickly or with minimal blood loss, or critical organs flying out of the back of an ambulance or floating off in space, really the only challenging thing about this game. Part of that stems from the controls being clumsy and incomplete. I say incomplete because there is no way to pivot the hand left and right at the wrist, only tilt the hand up and down (think of it this way, you can pivot the hand around the X and Y axis, but not the Z axis). The result is that you’re not able to line the hand up very well with objects that are at an angle, including organs that are packed in a particular way, or pick up an object, rotate, drop, and pick up again so that it’s in a better position for the cutting, smashing, etc. you’ll be doing. Perhaps this could have been accomplished by pressing M3 + left/right mouse movement? Or maybe that should be an M1 ability, and the scroll wheel could be used to control the elevation of the hand, which would be a major improvement over the current system, which descends as long as M1 is pressed, and comes rising up the second you let get. If you can master the controls, and even if you get a little lucky, you’ll breeze through this game.

All and all Surgeon Simulator 2013 is a silly little game that’s nice to put some time into now and then, though that’s probably more so for some of the more ridiculous achievements than any serious attempt at surgery. The game could use some improvement, and there are some things that are ridiculously more difficult than they should be, such as what it takes to try and get the patient’s right kidney out, which proved to be so difficult that I could not for the life of me complete the speed achievement for the standard mission, despite getting both the minimal time and bloodless achievements on my first attempt at a double kidney transplant in the ambulance, because the awkward physics system can work in your favor and jar the old organ out of place, even if your hand can’t. Still, the game makes for a nice break from some of the other more serious games that require tons of time (I took a break from Dark Souls to play this), and can be relaxing in a surprisingly frustrating way. I put 8 hours into it, which got me through most of the 11 missions with an A++ rating, as well as two thirds of the achievements. I got it at $2.50, which is probably about right, but the $3.33 I’ve seen it for a few times wouldn’t be a bad deal either. This is really the kind of game that needs a demo, because then you could experience for yourself the strange combination of fun and frustration that results for the uniquely awkward gameplay, the result of which warrants a frustrating yet humorously enjoyable 7 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 7/10

Suggested Price: $3.33, but I have seen it at $2.50

***

For more Surgeon Simulator 2013, check out this collection of screenshots otherwise unused in this review. Click on any one for a large image.