Gunpoint review: slick shoes

Instead of stopping there, developer Suspicious Developments hyphenates Gunpoint's genre with the addition of the Crosslink. By pressing the Alt key, Conway sees a wireframe of his targeted building and the colorful network of electricity that connects every device and switch therein. By clicking and dragging between two devices, he is able to rewire them and create traps, diversions and even pathways to his goal.

This is easier to understand in practice: In one level, I rewired a building so that the ping of my elevator arriving triggered a sound detector in that room. That sound detector was rigged to a light on the floor above, turning it off. A guard on the floor moseyed to the nearest lightswitch to rectify the problem, except I had connected the lightswitch to an adjacent locked door I needed to pass through. And guess who was on the other side of the door waiting to leap at the unsuspecting guard and incapacitate him?

This turns Gunpoint into something of a puzzle game, but it's also a playground. Sure, your plan of connecting an elevator button to a trapdoor may not pan out, but it's almost as much fun to watch it go wrong and try to recover on the fly. Even if you have to resort to gunplay (most levels reward you for silence and non-violence) or are killed, you always have the opportunity to return to an autosave just seconds prior, so there's no risk in experimentation.

As Conway upgrades his abilities - like the power to turn switches into deadly traps by connecting them to an outlet - the possibilities get even broader ... and more sadistic.