It’s very easy to roll your eyes on seeing another roguelike deckbuilder dungeon crawler these days (there’s so many of them!) but here’s one that we think you should give a chance.
Guncrypt is a Western-themed roguelite dungeon crawler, but with an interesting take on deckbuilding. Instead of collecting cards or power-ups, these are all manifested as unique bullets for your revolver. Each bullet has different properties, some even synergises with another. But the order in you load the bullet matters. Some bullets are “openers” and others “payoffs” so they need to be in the right order to trigger their respective damage boosts, for example.
Some of those properties include lighting that can chain to nearby enemies, poison that deals slow damage-over-time, the crow-controlling Root effect that makes enemies stay in place, and of course, ricochet effects that can bounce between nearby enemies perfect for those mobs that move in tightly.
Guncrypt is a rougelite, in that it has permanent unlocks at the home base, the town of Guncrypt. Expect to meet local townsfolk, accept quests and unlock upgrades before going down the floors to kill… Skulldracula. Or die trying, again and again.
Guncrypt also plays a lot different to your regular games. It’s designed around mouse controls in mind where you hold and drag the character around (though it should still work fine with a controller).
Guncrypt has a demo out now until June 22 as part of Steam Next Fest, but you can also check out the website here which includes a sampler of how the bullet loadout and controls work, no download required.
The website also has the ability to share a run result. Rather than just a “game over” results screen, each completed run in GunCrypt includes a link you can with anyone that links back to the site, which not only lets you see the build you had, but also what it looked in-game and even graphs, for stat nerds and those who really like to see numbers go up in graph form. Here’s an example the developer shared.
Speaking of the developer, Guncrypt is made by the folks from Halfbrick Studios, the Australian developers behind some of the biggest mobile games in the early days of mobile gaming including Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride and the less-known but equally rad Colossatron.
Guncrypt is coming out on PC (Steam).