Gunpoint is an indie game being developed by PC games journalist Tom Francis. If you read PC Gamer like me, you’ll probably know him for his writing more so than his game development skills. Nonetheless, he seems to be doing a pretty good job of creating his first game. In it, you play a spy who has to break into office blocks, hack computers and take out guards before making a daring escape, quite often by leaping out of a third story window. But that’s not even the best bit. You get a gadget called the Crosslink, which basically lets you rewire any electrical device to almost any other in the building, allowing for some very creative puzzle solving…
In the video below, Francis explains how the game works and shows off some of the unique ways to solve some of the missions. With the crosslink, getting through a locked door can be as simple as rewiring the door’s locking mechanism to a lightswitch. Flip the switch, and bingo – you’re in. But it can get hilariously more complicated than that if you want it to. Guards will patrol floors, and you can predict their movements by changing various switches around. If you turn out the lights on a floor, a guard will automatically attempt to turn them back on, so you can use this time to escape while he’s looking the other way, or take him out from the shadows. But why not set a trap, so that when he flips the lightswitch back on, he gets smushed by a nearby door? All that is possible, and it looks hilarious when you pull off carefully laid plans like that.
He was aiming to have it out by Christmas, but it looks like its been delayed unfortunately. Still, the game is set to be free when it comes out, so I have no problem waiting a bit longer.