Halfbrick Studios reached out to us recently, and they were hyped to show off their newest project, Guncrypt, a dungeon crawler built around loading bullets in the right order instead of chasing better gear.
If that name sounds familiar to you, they are the ones behind a string of popular mobile games like Jetpack Joyride, Fruit Ninja, and Dan the Man.
In-game, the weapons system has three guns with over 60 bullet types and 80 relic types that can be combined to change the gameplay according to your playstyle.
Load a Corrosive Shot right before a Heavy Shot, and it lands completely differently than loading the Heavy Shot first. Fuse two bullets together for a new combined effect, or rearrange your whole magazine between rooms if your current setup isn't working.
First few minutes of gameplay after finishing the tutorial.
Tarot cards add passive bonuses to your starting loadout between runs, and the Curse Level pushes things further across five tiers once a run stops feeling threatening. All of this plays out across four procedurally generated floors, each with its own enemies, hazards, and a boss waiting at the end.
The demo plays nice
Some lore info before we dive in.
I got the demo version of Guncrypt up on my Nobara Linux setup, and the game ran without downloading any additional files. So this was simply Steam Play leveraging Proton to get the game running on this non-native config.
Anyhow, the opening cutscene sets the stage. The town of Guncrypt used to be a quiet, well-off town, until an evil wizard showed up, cursed it, and stole everyone's souls, leaving the townsfolk busy bickering among themselves to actually act (sounds like current events ☠️).
Resulting in the job being handed to the player instead. ⚔️
Then came the tutorial, and it was a curveball since I'm used to WASD movement. There's none of that here; instead, I had to hold down left-click and drag to move my gunslinger around while shooting at whatever was in front of him.
Once I was in, I interacted with a few NPCs like the Pirate and the Blacksmith, then I entered a crypt, which immediately showed me the quest list with some quests visible. The main one was to uncover the mystery behind the curse put on by the evil wizard.
Starting a run and getting rekt.
I entered a dungeon, where it was straight into combat, dodging enemies while keeping an eye on my reload timer between rooms. At the end of a run that got the best of me, I was shown a scoreboard with info like the floor I died on, the bullets used, and a detailed list of the various scoring criteria.
A few things that I unlocked.
Bullet pickups work similarly. I ran into three options at one point and picked Spark, a 110-damage round that throws lightning on enemies during reload. A bit further in the game, the pirate, "Plunderin' Pete" handed me bombs, a useful right-click ability for blowing up enemies and obstacles.
Release, when?
As of writing, Guncrypt doesn't have a release date or price yet. The Steam page just lists it as "Coming soon." Meanwhile, you could try out the demo, which ran just fine on my test setup.
And, to wrap this up, a native Linux build is in the works too, arriving sometime after the launch.
