So I Tried… GUNPYRE

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never played before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time, I played GUNPYRE, from developer Spooky Coffee.

Well, technically, we played GUNPYRE. Recently, I and a few others in the GrinCast streamed ourselves shooting lots and lots of blood.

What I Thought It Was

This free game was sold to me as “some sort of roguelike with a vampire gun” and the fact that it says on Steam that it’s designed for controllers and won’t work with keyboard and mouse definitely further proved to me that it was going to be an action-y title. Then, GUNPYRE looked all dark and spooky, looking as though it had something to do with vampire hunters.

What It Actually Is

While simple, the aforementioned description wound up being fairly accurate! GUNPYRE (or “Gunpire” as the .exe file claims) is a top-down roguelike where you play as Samuel, who seems to be a monster hunter and who carries around two revolvers, both firing some type of blood-based ammo. Each has six shots and can only be reloaded with blood, either your own or an enemy’s. If you take your own, you’ll also lose one unit of health, but taking it from an enemy will kill them unless they’re the boss, in which case that’ll only mean you move on to their next phase. There seem to be four types of blood to use as ammo, with Samuel defaulting to using human bullets, the red kind. There’s a lab somewhere on the floor you’re exploring that can change your blood type, but until then, if you want the other three varieties, you’ll have to kill to get them. They are green, for iron bullets that pierce enemies; blue, for ice bullets that lodge themselves in place and burst when you reload; and purple, for thunder bullets that send Samuel zipping forward. What do human bullets do? More damage, I think!

Will I Keep Playing?

I’m not too sure. GUNPYRE definitely has a lot of polish, as can be seen in the impressively spooky visuals, the variety of rooms to explore, and the various upgrades you can find for your bullet types, but there are a few details that keep it from being an overall rewarding experience for me. The audio, for instance, is rather nondescript and unhelpful, with very few cues for when to dodge or when you’ve successfully taken something down. Furthermore, the camera’s size is a tad frustrating, with it sometimes feeling like you have to be close to an enemy to be able to see them properly. Furthermore, I kept finding it difficult to tell when I was going to take damage, which was very annoying considering how the game focuses on keeping the player slow with the limited ammo and slow fire rate, all while the monsters get to move swiftly around the arena. There’s also a tutorial which helps a bit, but even with that, there were several mechanics that just weren’t explained. I might jump back in to clear out the rest of the achievements (because woo, this game supports achievements, and I have a bit of a perfectionist problem), but I doubt this is one I’ll keep coming back to.