Connor
‘T’was the winter of 1927-28 when I rolled off the steamer and into the sleepy town of Orwell.
Beset by a labyrinth of worm eaten buildings and the blanket of apathy cast by a motley crew of benighted residents it was a mere stop from my true destination; alas… the train was held yet again and I was stuck.
Thus I quested to clear my shrouded path onwards… but beneath that town in rat infested sewers where creatures unmentionable lurk in hidden depths of turgid water something was stirring.
Mysterious men in masks wielding powers unnatural stood in my path, and I can feel in my bones the movement of something down here with me.
Something huge, something that crawls and writhes and stares with inhuman eyes.
Good thing I have this gun that is also an umbrella’.
If there’s one thing Devolver Digital has down to a fine science at this point, it’s setting a tone.
The very home menu landing hits you with the only word you can expect to hear spoken to you in plain English. A growled ‘Gunbrella’ spoken like a Saturday morning cartoon villain putting on his best beastly voice.
The title is set to the backdrop of a steady descent to underground mines far below with a background music that is either a violin mimicking the buzzing of a fly, or an unusually musical insect.
Pixel blood splatter patterns cover the menu options and that theme is consistent because every selection sounds WET.
If you didn’t know what you were in for before, you would be now.
The game opens with a brief sequence explaining your onset motivation. A murdered wife and your only clue to that murder, the eponymous Gunbrella. The entire segment is filmed in the grainy black and white filter of those ye olde’ timey photos of unsmiling miners and small town folk looking at the photographer as if wondering how many shillings they could get for that fancy camera.
Then you are released into the game-world with a mission, a gun and a direction. Let the eldritch horror begin.
Gunbrella’s gameplay is fairly straightforward.
You wield the gunbrella, simultaneously a miraculous weapon capable of loading several different ammo types and an umbrella capable of acting as a parachute, jump boost and deflector shield.
Gotta get me one of those.
Items play the other half of your arsenal, with healing and temporary HP boosts as well as a pill that makes you find more money for a short period of time…
REALLY gotta get me one of those.
You can deflect ranged attacks by blocking with your umbrella and a timed block will reflect the projectile back at the attacker. Now you have all your tools, how well you can juggle them all will determine whether you come out the other end of Gunbrella looking like John Wick, or Super Meat Boy.
The introduction to the first enemies is somewhat jarring.
You encounter your first murderous robed cultist with very little fanfare; it will be some time yet before the first townspeople mention problems with the local cult.
For a man specifically out for answers it seems a bit slack of our protagonist not to have asked the first face he ran into about that.
Imagine if the narrator of ‘Shadow over Innsmouth’ got into a heated shotgun duel with a wandering band of slimy hobos in the city sewers and then immediately went back to being weirded out by fish people without mentioning the incident at all. A light smattering of ludo-narrative dissonance that wouldn’t be mentionable in a game that hadn’t done so much work building up its atmosphere.
Dialogue is delivered in that Charlie brown mumble of old, when voice actors were something that real studios had and video games were the domain of small time office nerds not knowing what cultural goldmine they were about to strike.
Small details matter here… speech bubbles float slightly as if breathing along with the character delivering them. Each hit of the next button is the keystroke of a typewriter. The checkpoints are glowing benches used by seating your trench-coated protagonist on to spend a moment in quiet brooding. Sound is masterfully presented on all angles.
Eerie background noises blend into the music until you aren’t really sure which is which, the ambiance fades when in menus, but never goes away entirely. The result is the constant tickling feeling at the back of your neck that something is out there you cannot see.
Something that may be watching you.
Then you interrupt a ritual in the heart of a cultist’s hideout where bodies are being sacrificed to an eldritch monstrosity called ‘the baby’ and before you know it, you are fighting a giant eyeball forming the nucleus of a writhing golem of flesh.
The more you shoot it, the more the room becomes drenched in blood. So much blood you can almost feel it seeping from your screen.
This is the part where I knew the game was going take a step away from the basis in reality it had established for itself.
We had begun the descent into a realm of elder gods twisting reality to their own incomprehensible ends. Where does this journey end?
Well now that would be telling.
Released: September 2023
Rating: M15+
Platforms reviewed: PC (Windows)
Genre: Action
Developer: Devolver Digital
Publisher: Devolver Digital