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Movie studios talked about the 'high concept' or the 'elevator pitch'; the ability to condense the plot or premise of a film to a two-minute sell, a breathless paragraph, a single tag line and image that will lodge in the audience's mind. If you're making a video game in 2016, sometimes you need to go one further. If you're trying to stand out on Steam amid dozens of new releases every day, and you don't necessarily have a Hollywood marketing budget to get your point across, you need to sell a game with its title alone. (As someone who runs a website in the social media age, I have some sympathy with this.)Take this week's wonderful indie, Enter the Gungeon. I mean, what more do you need? You could even miss off the "enter the". There will be a dungeon, and guns; this being 2016, it will probably be a procedurally generated roguelike with pixel art. Oh, look, got it in one, just as we were supposed to.
You even get a sense of the tone, pulpy and flippant and furious. You might intuit that the guns are not just potent firearms with which to clear the dungeon but the existential point of the dungeon itself, and so it proves. Guns are everything in Enter the Gungeon, and anything can be a gun.
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