20 Minutes Till Dawn (or 20MTD) offers a surprising amount of depth with every run from beginning to end, and accomplishes to supply a full rogue-lite experience in a very short timeframe. Though a difficult game, there is enough balance (or lack thereof) to make you, the player, able to progress through each run without feeling like you've been beaten senseless by the developers.

Everything but the dirt you tread will try to kill you- trees included! The difficulty of this game isn't to be understated, whether the factors that make up the difficulty are intentional or not. An unintentional hurdle that you have to jump over is the visibility of the the character(s) you play as, and the enemies that you face. The color palette the game uses emphasizes a very specific aesthetic that's seldom seen in other media, but it can harm the player by disrupting the gameplay flow as the timer gets closer to completing a run. Enemies can and will overpopulate the screen, which while it may seem like an arbitrary nitpick considering the genre of the game, it can confuse a player as to where they can and cannot move simply due to the different entities blending in with one another as well as the background. There have been a lot of moments during my game sessions where my run will suddenly end, and the only thing I can think of is "What even killed me?" Fortunately, the developers have circumvented the visibility issue by adding a toggle in the settings that enable outlines for you, and the enemies. I highly recommend enabling this option!

The depth of the game comes from the ability to pick a character along with a weapon, which is a huge feat over other games in the genre like HoloCure or Vampire Survivors. This allows players to craft and experiment with different builds that are vastly different from one another, and increase the games longevity tenfold simply due to the fact. Personally, a build I've been having a lot of fun with is using the character Spark with a shotgun, and upgrades that revolve around effects applied to my character/summons upon reloading such as Holy Arts, Fresh Clip, or every upgrade under the Electromancy skill tree.

20MTD offers an engaging rogue-lite to players who are simply looking to accomplish a lot in little time, or those seeking a challenge that rewards those for their competency. I'm surprised that the game is as cheap as it is, which is currently selling at $5.00 USD at like Steam or the Epic Games store. Play it if you haven't yet.

interested by the artstyle & title (as well as it being free last holiday). After literally 20 minutes of experimenting, I felt as though my time would've been better spend diving into the mechanics of something else. while this certainly doesn't mean that i wasn't invested in the progressively more difficult gameplay and bullet-hell gameplay, it does mean I didn't feel the inclination to explore new weapons, skills, or classes.

Also, controls wise, it felt as though my inputs were being received inconsistently, with choosing upgrades per level up & re-loading feeling clunky at times. couldn've easily just been something strange on my end, but after checking my settings several times trying to tweak it to be just right, I gave up.

On a base level the game is really good, it has an amazing style at first glance and it handles its basic mechanics really well. Once given a deeper look after playing some hours you can notice many flaws, first-off once you learn how to play decently it becomes way too easy for like 3/4 of the game until you unlock the higher difficulties; speaking about unlock this game could really use some as sooner than later most of your builds end up feeling mostly the same.

It's a really enjoyable game, don't get me wrong, but sadly it quickly gets stale after not so many hours.

Tried to get into it but unfortunately I don’t think it has anything for me. Very well made game with good reason to exist, but i found the experience to be a mix of playing the game half asleep barely paying attention, and occasionally trying to focus and get a run going but 20 minutes in this game feels like an hour everywhere else. The slow pace and difficulty curve that is frankly fucking absurd was what turned me off from the game in the end. Horny hp lovecraft fans can have it all they want tho respectfully