Game Flow: Enter the Gungeon

Last week we looked at a very large, very open-ended game in Breath of the Wild. This week’s game will be much easier to analyze, since it is fairly linear. Like Tetris, its play sessions are repetitive, as opposed to the progressing story and character of Breath of the Wild. As always, we will examine the flow conditions of challenge, skill, goals, and feedback, and we will note areas of the game where these conditions could use improvement. Without further ado, let us Enter the Gungeon.

Challenge and Skill. Enter the Gungeon is a roguelike bullet hell shooter. Challenge comes in many forms, including navigating around hazards, defeating enemies, and avoiding enemy fire. As the player advances deeper into the Gungeon, enemies become more plentiful, more dangerous, and tougher to beat. Environmental hazards also become more plentiful and dangerous, giving the player even more things to look out for. In addition to regular enemies, there is a boss on each floor that must be defeated in order to advance, and they are also stronger the deeper the player goes.

Skill with regard to the above challenges can be cultivated through practice. There is a tutorial that teaches the absolute basics, but most of the content in the game can only be practiced outside of the tutorial. The player could simply try to improve their reaction times and hand-eye coordination, but each enemy and boss also has attack patterns that the player can learn and take advantage of to dispatch them with minimal trouble. Enter the Gungeon facilitates such practice through its roguelike nature. Dying and restarting has no negative consequences on future attempts, so the player is free to hone their skills and learn enemy patterns. There is also a way to skip earlier floors of the Gungeon if the player feels as though those floors are no longer challenging enough. This feature allows the player to more quickly practice against those enemies that are currently the most challenging.

Further challenge is present in Enter the Gungeon in the form of randomly generated items that the player can find throughout every attempt. These can range from new guns to helpful tools or defensive boosts. There are a large number of items in the game, so each time will likely contain a different set for the player to obtain. The challenge, then, comes from utilizing each item to its fullest extent. For instance, some guns lend themselves more to the player taking potshots at enemies, while others are more effective when standing right in the line of fire. Skill with regard to this challenge comes in how well the player can use the set of items they find, as well as how quickly they can adapt to each new one. Because some items are simply more powerful than others, this leads to different attempts having different levels of challenge, although never to the point of the game not posing any challenge at all.

Goals. A game of Enter the Gungeon is composed of many small goals, most of which are very proximal to the player’s present situation. The largest goal of any one attempt would be to clear all floors of the Gungeon, which can easily be broken down into “clear the current floor.” This goal involves finding the boss chamber of the current floor and defeating the boss. Finding the chamber comes first, so the most proximal goal leading up to finding it would be “clear the current room.” This goal will present itself whenever the player enters a new room, which will happen multiple times on any given floor. Most new rooms will have enemies, so the goal will then become “defeat all enemies in this room.” Most enemies will attempt to attack the player, so an even more proximal goal may be “avoiding taking damage” or “avoid that attack in particular.” Some enemies may present more of a threat than others, so another goal may be “defeat that enemy as quickly as possible.” We can see how Enter the Gungeon allows for very clear goals to be set with regard to combat and advancing through the game.

We mentioned above that there are many items that the player can find throughout the Gungeon that will help them in one way or another. Therefore, another goal may be to find some of those items. Each floor always contains a shop and two chests where the player can obtain items. Finding the rooms that contain them is a goal similar to finding the boss chamber, and will involve the same clearing of individual rooms as the player progresses towards that goal. Upon finding a shop or chest, the player may be presented with a new goal depending on how much money and how many keys they have at the time. Most chests require a key to open, so if the player wants to see what’s inside, they will need to bring a key. Keys can sometimes be found after clearing a room of enemies, or they can often be purchased in a shop. “Find a key” may turn into “collect money,” and the same goal may become pursued after entering a shop and seeing a good item for sale. There are multiple ways to make money, but the most common and reliable method is simply defeating enemies. Since clearing rooms and defeating enemies contributes to nearly every goal the player might have, simply going through every room on a given floor may be the best way to progress towards them all at once.

Feedback. We will now go through the goals listed above and note the ways that Enter the Gungeon provides feedback to the player on their progress towards those goals. Clearing all floors of the Gungeon results in the credits rolling, which is a pretty clear sign that this goal has been accomplished. Moving to more specific, more proximal goals, each floor has a boss that must be defeated to progress. Boss battles share many features with regular enemy combat, such as red bullets indicating enemy fire, but one form of feedback unique to boss battles is the boss health bar. This bar depletes as the player damages the boss, allowing them to track their progress towards defeating it. Regarding combat in general, there are several feedback mechanisms in place to keep the player informed about their actions and the game state. The user interface always shows how much health and armor the player has. If the player takes damage, the screen will flash to indicate this. Nearly every source of damage in the game deals one half of a heart of damage, and those sources that deal a full heart are colored black and red with an ominous aura surrounding them. The player will not wonder how much damage they took when they get hit, leaving one fewer thing to worry about in the middle of a potentially hectic fight. Similarly, most player weapons will make a visual or audio effect upon successfully damaging an enemy. These cues tell the player whether what they’re doing is accomplishing what they want. Once all enemies in a room have been defeated, the doors in the room will unlock and the minimap will reappear (under default minimap settings), letting the player know that the room has been cleared. If they have taken damage, they may set a goal to find more health. In such a case, it will be very clear when they have found it, since health pickups use the same symbol as the player’s hearts in the user interface.  

The minimap itself gives the player valuable feedback on their progress. In addition to tracking which rooms have already been visited, the map also has several symbols to indicate points of interest. The boss chamber is marked with a large skull-shaped gold symbol, the shop uses the face of the shopkeeper, rooms with chests have a chest symbol, and other NPCs’ faces might appear to indicate their presence in a room. If the player’s goal is to find any of these places in particular, or if their goal is simply to collect more items, each of these symbols will guide them to those goals. Shops and chests in particular have further indicators of the quality of the items within them. More expensive items will be of a higher rarity, which generally means they will be stronger. Chests come in a range of colors to show the rarity of the item contained inside. Once the player has obtained an item, they can check its description in their inventory, which usually gives some hint as to what it does. Even without such hints, the player can always test out new guns or items on enemies nearby. Sometimes, two items will have an additional effect as a result of possessing both simultaneously. When this occurs, a unique sound effect will play upon obtaining the second in the pair, and a bright blue arrow will show up for a moment to indicate the synergy. All these forms of feedback help the player understand what is going on and how their actions affect the game world around them.

Improvements. There are several says Enter the Gungeon could be improved with regard to its fulfilling the conditions of flow. First, with regard to skill and challenge, the roguelike nature of the game makes it such that randomness will always be a factor in determining how challenging any given attempt is. This means that some attempts may automatically become better or worse at promoting flow, simply in virtue of the items a player obtains. However, the randomness itself does present some opportunities for skill expression, and it is an important aspect of the genre, so changing it would result in an entirely different game.

Another artifact of the genre of bullet hell shooters is the occasional difficulty in locating important objects in a hectic room, such as enemy bullets. There are times when there is so much going on at once that focusing on avoiding danger while also aiming properly is difficult. While this can make feedback more difficult to receive, it also increases the challenge of the game. However, completely consistent visual indicators for enemy and player fire could make recognition of danger easier while maintaining the possibility for bullet hell levels of particle effects.

Another in-combat improvement to feedback would be some kind of clear indication of when invulnerability from dodge rolling ends. The invulnerability does not last the entire duration of the animation, so the player must understand the timing and use them wisely. A clear visual cue would go a long way in helping the player get the timing down and implement dodge rolls more effectively. Another improvement to the dodge roll’s feedback could be an indication of when the player successfully avoids damage using the dodge roll’s invulnerability. Feedback is important for letting the player know what they’re doing and if it’s working, and the dodge roll is one tool that could use better feedback.

The final area for improvement is regarding one of Enter the Gungeon’s main features: the guns. As mentioned above, each gun and item has a description in the inventory, but not all of them clearly state what they do. Again, part of the challenge is discovering how an item works and when best to use it, but some immediate feedback upon obtaining it would be helpful. Simple weapon statistics such as rate of fire and damage per shot would give the player a general idea of how powerful a gun is without necessarily telling them how best to use it. Likewise, being able to see the rarity of an item from the inventory would help the player know generally how good a weapon obtained from a boss or NPC quest is. Synergies are also often unclear regarding their effects. Some are very obvious, but others may simply increase damage or fire rate slightly, and the player must discover this through trial and error (or looking it up online, but this would rapidly destroy immersion and flow). Perhaps not only in the inventory screen, but also when first picking up a new gun the game could give a simple rundown of its statistics. This would speed up the process by which a player decides whether to use a new gun. The more clear and immediate the feedback, the better the flow experience.

Conclusion. Enter the Gungeon has a nice, gradual increase in challenge and allows the player to practice the skills required to meet that challenge. The random aspect of the items the player can find adds another layer of challenge to be met with another layer of skill. Goals are fairly simple and very proximal to the player. There will never be a point where the player does not know what they should be doing at the present moment. Feedback on progress towards those goals is mostly good, but some improvements could be made to make the feedback clearer or more immediate. Enter the Gungeon has room for improvement, but overall it’s a good game for inducing a state of flow.