The portmanteau of this game is the highlight.

I don’t just mean that the game’s title being memorable is all this game has going for it but Gunbrella’s biggest strength is the Gunbrella itself.
As a tool it is used for combat, traversal and tricks - the gun fires like a shotgun with the ZR trigger while tapping and holding R unfold an umbrella, using it while being attacked creates a shield, using it while falling causes you to glide like Mary Poppins, that would be enough but there is more. This “shield” has a parry as timing the opening just right can ricochet projectiles back whilst a simple tap while moving a direction also causes the protagonist to dash and finally if there are hooks they can be grabbed giving more options for traversal as they appear in the later levels.
Alongside usual hopping and wall jumping the Gunbrella makes this game a fun time to control if a little floaty.

Back during, I want to say, Steam NextFest this alone sold me on the game. It was a joy darting about through corridors, splating enemies, taking out turrets with their own attacks - it was slick, simple and responsive.

Sadly however the demo really did just show the best game had to offer as progression of systems is slow and arguably non-existent.
You do get different ammo types, grenades, machine gun bullets for a longer range and others but none of them ever feel as good as the default shotty.
Switching weapons is done simply using the d-pad but I found having more choices just meant flicking between them was more of a pain and I’d just sell most of it in-game for health items or the later, extremely unexciting upgrade system that increases strength and reload speed.

Enemy types seem to be diverse at first, the sewers have weird creatures whereas elsewhere on your mission above land you’re fighting cultists with their guns, magic and turrets but those two splits are mostly all there are too.
Levels too mostly feel quite similar, the dark grimy steampunk world of Gunbrella involves a lot of shades or brown and grey, later on there’ll be a bit of snow and the finale does bring a little more colour but again for the largest percentage of the game it feels quite the same.

Regarding the world of Gunbrella this is a point where it completely changed from my expectations and I wasn’t left either excited or majorly disappointed, once the credits rolled however I still just wondered about the logic in the design decision and whether or not the end game was what Doinksoft were even going for.
To explain, with a side-scrolling action platformer I was expecting a lot of extended stages of fighting through, moving right into another with an occasional boss.
What I was met with was much slower, the protagonist on a revenge mission to save his daughter and avenge his dead wife traveling slowly between chatting with NPCs to get leads that would eventually get you into action heavy levels, get a macguffin or piece of information and back into the crawl of doing so again.
I love stories in games, but here it just felt like it was trying to take the main stage on a game in a genre which is meant to be led by how it feels to play and not how you feel experiencing its story.
The story isn’t bad per say, it is just unremarkable and takes up more time with going back and forth with NPCs than it does letting you use the thing the game is named after.
I said by the credits I questioned if this is what Doinksoft were aiming for - in game you have a journal that gives you your objective but it is never more than one page and I never seemed to have more than one sidequest at a time. The way the objectives are presented says to me that there were going to be lots of quests, during the game there are conversation choices and whilst you do see some impact of your decisions it didn’t feel like it ever branched anywhere, just another thing to give the illusion that the game wouldn’t be linear and would branch out.
Non-linear isn’t something I was expecting going in and I wasn’t disappointed by the end when it wasn’t, but the choices in pacing and presentation made me feel like maybe the developers were worried about being labeled linear, that a journal to show objectives or conversational choices would hide their “shame” of simply being an excellent action-platformer and that’s weird.

Gunbrella was on my radar quickly because they made the excellent mini Metroidvania Gato Roboto which I thought was great, an excellent distillation of the genre, still had some of its own style and never outstayed its welcome. Gato Roboto never seemed to show hints of it trying to be anymore and that was fine, it aimed to be something and it succeeded.
Now Gunbrella has its own style, didn’t out-stay its welcome either but just feels a lot muddier and messier.
I almost feel bad because in a way I am saying that this game having ambition was a poor choice.

As far as what they did with this ambition, I found it a mixed bag.
The characters and dialogue are solid, the story while fairly cliché was good and the world with its hints of Lovecraft was good.
The dreary feel and colour did help create a world but not only did it make levels feel a little too similar as mentioned before, it also made some parts harder to navigate, back and foreground items not always being so clearly marked, invisible walls and odd edges occasionally ruining the flow - the world is cool but it was not concise.
The challenge or at least the curve barely went up due to lack of diversity and I always felt I was given tools but not much to do with them.
Even in combat encounters like bosses, the first two or three felt good and later on they either felt too easy, simple or even like a retread with the final boss just being disappointing.


Sadly disappointing is the word. I was expecting more from Gunbrella, coming into 2023 I believed this would be one of a handful of indie games that everyone should play and everyone would be talking about but instead 2023 has been too good that it has passed by and even somebody like me, who would prefer to shun the AAA and shout about the smaller titles, I find it unlikely I’m going to recommend this with such love as some of the other recent indie titles I’ve played even in the last few weeks.
Doinksoft have definitely got some great ideas, even though I’ve come out the end feeling quite cold I would like to see more Gunbrella because as I said from the start the Gunbrella itself is great - a thing to experience and enjoy, it just needs a better world to be carried through.