Enter the Gungeon opens with a simple promise: there is a gun at the bottom of this place that can kill the past. Four misfits take that promise seriously. Each one carries a regret heavy enough to walk into a shifting fortress full of ammunition come to life. Dodge Roll built a 2016 roguelike around that bargain, and it still holds up as one of the sharpest shooters of its decade.
Trailer, via DevolverDigital.
The Marine, the Convict, the Hunter, and the Pilot
You pick one of four Gungeoneers. The Marine, the Convict, the Hunter, and the Pilot each start with their own weapons and items, and each has a private reason for the descent. Their shared goal is the legendary gun at the bottom of the Gungeon, a sprawling, ever-shifting fortress inhabited by the Gundead — hostile creatures made of ammunition.
The setup is thin on purpose. Enter the Gungeon does not stop for cutscenes or long speeches. It hands you a character, a floor, and a room full of bullets, and it trusts the shooting to carry the rest.
What carries it is the feel. Dodge Roll built a top-down bullet hell shooter with roguelike elements, and the two halves fit together better than they have any right to. You shoot, you roll, you flip a table, you shoot again.
Dodge Rolls, Table Flips, and Blanks
Combat in Enter the Gungeon is about memorizing patterns. Enemies fire dense waves of projectiles, and survival depends on reading those waves before they arrive. You have three tools for that.
- The dodge roll, which makes you briefly invulnerable to damage.
- Tables, which you knock over to create cover.
- Blanks, a limited resource that deletes every enemy projectile in a room.
That list is the whole game in miniature. The dodge roll is the most important of the three, and it is also the most dangerous. It moves you through a wall of bullets, but only if your timing is right. Time it wrong and you take the damage you were trying to avoid.
The tables are the quiet hero of the design. They turn any room into a temporary bunker, and they force you to think about where you are standing, not just where you are shooting. Blanks are the panic button, and the game rations them so you never stop feeling the squeeze.
Five Floors, Twenty Rooms, One Random Boss
The Gungeon is made up of five floors, each holding roughly twenty rooms. The layout and the rewards are procedurally generated from a set of pre-created rooms, so the shape of a run changes every time. Dodge Roll designed and playtested each individual room by hand, then used procedural generation to assemble them into a random configuration. That is the right order of operations, and you can feel it.
The rooms are not random noise. They are authored spaces that happen to be shuffled. That distinction is why Enter the Gungeon’s floors read as legible instead of chaotic, even when the bullets are not.
Each floor ends with a random boss. Kill it and you move down. Die and the run is over.
Permadeath is absolute here. When a Gungeoneer dies, every item and gun collected on that playthrough is gone, and the next run starts again on the first floor. There is no checkpoint, no mercy, no carried-over arsenal.
A Unicorn Horn That Fires Rainbows
The guns are the reason people stay. Enter the Gungeon hands out conventional pistols and rifles, then it hands out a unicorn horn that fires rainbows and a mailbox that shoots envelopes. The arsenal is broad, strange, and consistently funny without ever winking at you.
You get new weapons and items from chests, shops, and boss fights. Enemies drop bullet casings and keys. Casings buy guns and items at shops. Keys open chests. The economy is simple and it keeps every room worth clearing.
Between runs, you return to the Breach. The Breach is a hub area where you talk to non-player characters and unlock new items. It is the one place in Enter the Gungeon where the pressure lets up, and it does real work: it turns a string of failed runs into a slow accumulation of progress.
Many of the guns draw on earlier games, with Mega Man and Metroid named as inspirations. Other mechanics were built to push players toward using the layouts of the levels rather than ignoring them. You can see both impulses in the final product. The guns are a tribute act. The rooms are an argument.
Three Million Copies and a Word From Gun Godz
Development started in 2014, when four Mythic Entertainment employees left to form Dodge Roll. The name “Gungeon” came to lead designer Dave Crooks while he was listening to the soundtrack for the game Gun Godz. That is the entire origin of the title, and it is a better story than most games get.
Enter the Gungeon first released on April 5, 2016, for Linux, macOS, PlayStation 4, and Windows 10. It later reached Google Stadia, Android, iOS, Mac, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. By June 2020, it had sold over three million copies.
That number matters more than any single review score. Three million copies is not a cult hit. It is a game that found a large audience and kept it, years after launch, across a spread of platforms that most independent studios never touch.
What Enter the Gungeon Gets Right
The best thing about Enter the Gungeon is that it never lies to you. The bullets are exactly where they look like they are. The dodge roll does exactly what it says. The boss is random, but it is never unfair, because every pattern can be learned.
The worst thing is the same thing. Five floors of roughly twenty rooms is a lot of repetition, and permadeath means you will see the early floors far more often than the late ones. Players who do not click with the dodge roll will bounce off hard, and the game will not meet them halfway.
That is a real cost, and it is worth naming. Enter the Gungeon asks for pattern memorization as its entry fee. If you are not willing to pay it, the Gungeon is a wall.
But the wall is well built. The Breach gives failure a purpose. The gun variety keeps runs from blurring together. The table flip is a small mechanic that changes how every room plays. And the promise at the center of it — a gun that can kill the past — gives the whole descent a shape that most roguelikes never bother to construct.
The Verdict on the Gungeon
Enter the Gungeon is not a game about its story. It is a game about the half-second before a bullet hits you, repeated until you get it right. The Gundead, the Breach, the casings and keys, the unicorn horn, the mailbox — all of it serves that half-second.
Dodge Roll shipped this in 2016 and it has aged better than most of its contemporaries. The pixel work is clean. The controls are exact. The procedural assembly of hand-built rooms remains the smartest decision in the design, because it gives you novelty without giving you junk.
The four Gungeoneers are thin characters, and that is fine. Their regrets are a premise, not a plot. What the game does with that premise is put you in a room with too many bullets and ask you to solve it.
Three million copies sold by June 2020 says players agreed. The critical aggregate sits at 8.2 out of 10 across 13 outlets, and that number is honest. Enter the Gungeon is not flawless — the repetition is real, and the difficulty curve will lose people — but it is one of the cleanest executions of its genre, and it earns its place.
If you have never played it, the dodge roll is the thing to learn first. Everything else in Enter the Gungeon follows from that.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
