20 Minutes Till Dawn is one of the many new Bullet Heaven games. It is more close to a twin stick shooter as you do aim and press a button to shoot, so it isn't as automatic as others in the genre. The basic loop is there, choose upgrades, find synergies (some things scale of move speed so you'll chase move speed upgrades and so on), and it feels great to see your power growing and obliterating enemies on a good run.

But as with other games in the genre, an important piece is the meta progression outside of each run and more on a global level. The game does have increasingly hard difficulties as "Darkness" levels, but most other unlockable features are based on currency, and they are mostly characters and weapons, so while there is a variety of options to go for, they are almost all available to unlock immediately, and there is not a lot of variety on upgrades during the run, which makes it feel unsurprising very early.

Also something minor but that really bothers me: if you have two options in the UI and the difference between the two is just that one is red and the other is white, I won't really know which one is selected playing on a controller. it works on mouse-over, but for controllers it really doesn't.

So in summary, it is fun to play, but meta progression feels unrewarding and I started to feel the fatigue very early, still worth it for the four to five hours I played, but I'm not inclined to sink more time.