When the sun shines, we’ll shine together.
Gunbrella is one of those action games enlivened by a little bit of recurrent magic that never really fades.
The magic lies with the Gunbrella itself.
Gunbrella
At its simplest it’s a shotgun that has a shield mode.
Pull up the umbrella and it’s possible for you to deflect shots.
Get the timing right and you’re able to direct them back where they came from.
Very handy against turrets.
But there’s more to it too.
Jump and kick off the umbrella and you get a sort of double-jump effect.
You catch the wind and are lofted higher.
Everything’s patchwork and delivered in lovely pixel art: houses will have missing tiles or busted shutters.
Trains will whip past at double speed when you arrive at a station.
Baddies are spectacularly villainous, with skeleton faces and natty toppers.
Everyone’s hunched and caped and heavily shouldered.
We’re all moths in this world.
Most dungeons form these neat little nested oxbow loops.
Combat meanwhile is Souls if Souls had a shotgun, I guess?
In that it’s all about making sure you deal damage without leaving an opening.
But later enemies need a bit more strategy, and you better balance offence with defence.
you oughta use the shotgun and the umbrella.
(And any other weapons you pick up.)
Combat, as with Souls games, is often over very quickly if you’re doing it right.
This made me wonder, when I learned that the chunk of Gunbrella I was getting contained bosses.
How does a boss fit into a world where most fights are over in seconds?
The first boss, at any rate, presents itself as a series of lunges.
It took me an age to learn that the rhythm to defeat him was a rhythm I already knew.
Attack, regroup, with my shotgun blasts not just doing damage but arresting the boss’s forward movement.
I got a chunk of their health and I also got a chunk of tempo.
It’s a really ingenious battle, I think.
What excites me most about seeing more of Gunbrella is seeing more of the world.
And what comes after that?
