Gunpoint

I picked this up for $5.99 during the Steam Summer sale, and it's in the running for the best six dollars I've spent all year. Thanks to Summer Sale bargains and Humble Indie Bundles, my Steam library has grown to epic proportions; my list of unplayed games has nearly caught up with my Netflix queue. I truly despair of catching up (I know, #firstworldproblems). But Gunpoint stands out like a shining star, so much so that as soon as I finished the game I started over and played it all over again.

Remember the early days of video gaming, when a couple guys with thick glasses and poor hygiene could crank out a hit game by toiling away in a basement? For a while there, it seemed like those days were long gone, subsumed by the monster budgets of the AAA development cycle. But between cheap, user-friendly creation tools like the Unity and Game Maker, and the limitless crowd resources of the Internet, the game industry has come full circle back to the days of garage development. Case in point, Gunpoint was created by an editor at PC Gamer with no programming experience experimenting in his spare time. Designer Tom Frances built a working prototype, got some outside help with art assets and music (which he recruited via his blog), and voilà- a hit was born.

Total development cost? $30.

You play as Richard Conway, freelance spy and occasional breaker of fourth walls. Your missions involve sneaking buildings protected by elaborate surveillance systems and some very trigger-happy guards. Your tools are "Bullfrog" hypertrousers which allow you to leap Spider-Man style onto buildings, through windows, or into guards; and the Crosslink device, which allows you to hack the building's electronic system, letting you do things like disable alarms or rewire light switches to doors.

That's it. Two simple abilities, and they give you a huge variety of freedom to explore levels and experiment. You can go the Sam Fisher route, stalking each guard and punching them into oblivion. Or go the tricky hacker route and rewire the building to lock guards in closets, send them scrambling in the dark, or otherwise mess with their tiny brains. If you're spotted, all it takes is one bullet to kill you deader than dead, so the goal is to approach guards from behind or avoid being spotted altogether. The game rates you on things like number of times spotted or how many kills/knockouts you racked up, but there's no real reward or punishment for any particular play-style. You're free to experiment and play however you want.

And did I mention that it's completely hilarious? Humor in games can be difficult to do well, but Francis' script is so sharp and witty that I was literally laughing out loud at my computer.

The game includes a level editor and tools for sharing your creations online. I haven't sampled any user-created content lately, but I'm sure the community has come up with some amazing stuff. The editing tools are robust and easy to use, and I may one day get bold and design some levels of my own.

Gunpoint is available for $9.99 on Steam. I guess you could wait for a sale to pop up, but this game is easily worth ten bucks. Go get it!