20 Minutes Till Dawn Review

I'm sleeping in.

20 Minutes Till Dawn is a bullet hell/bullet heaven action roguelike where the player faces off against multitudes of foes in a near pitch-black arena. Taking place in the dead of night, you’ll need to survive for 20 minutes to see the dawn and live another day. But is this a life worth living?

The premise and flow are quite familiar and easy enough for newcomers to wrap their heads around. First, you’ll pick a character to use in the coming fight, with each character having unique abilities and strengths. Next, you’ll pick a primary weapon to use through the night. Finally, you’ll select the arena in which you will battle. Once that is done, the proper game begins, and the hordes shuffle toward you. Using your weapon of choice, you’ll take out the foes until you earn enough experience to level up and select some form of upgrade.

These upgrades come in a few different forms: Basic stat boosts, summons, and supporting effects. Stat boosts are just as they sound, simple mathematical increases (or decreases) to things like your bullet damage, health, or speed. Summons are creatures and objects that have a physical presence outside of the player and do damage to enemies. Lastly, supporting effects are things like shields you can use to protect yourself or elemental effects like freezing your foes upon hit. The options for starting abilities are fairly limited, but each has its own evolution path, and many can combine with other upgrades to form powerful fusion effects.

As you fight and the timer ticks down, you’ll not only fight increasingly large numbers of ghouls, but also occasionally need to face down more powerful bosses or elite enemies. These enemies are visually distinguished by their size and color scheme, but are also much more powerful than their normal foe counterparts. Upon death, these elites drop a chest that provides the player with the choice of one of three tomes. These tomes are a stat boost or an ability that is unique to each character or equipped weapon type, and are generally extremely powerful.

After surviving the full 20 minutes, the battle just kind of ends. There’s no sunrise to signify the coming of the day, and no monster to end the run. Everything just disappears, the screen goes black, and your score shows up in the middle of the frame. Quite an anti-climactic end to an otherwise enjoyable sequence. Whether you live or die, runes are awarded as currency to purchase permanent upgrades and to unlock new characters and weapons. Weapon and character unlocks are quite cheap, and given the large amount of runes awarded at the end of a completed run, you’ll have everything unlocked in no time at all.

20 Minutes Till Dawn is visually striking, but lacks the complex mechanics or variety needed to lift it above the field.

Perhaps the most apparent feature of 20 Minutes is its distinct art style and color scheme. All enemies, player characters, environments, and objects are depicted in greyscale, with some defining features or projectiles splashed with red to make them stand out.  In still images and menus, this presents a striking picture, but the lack of color variation makes visibility in action difficult. So many enemies appear on screen at any given time, but without any major difference in the gradient used between specific mobs, high-priority targets like projectile users end up blending into the crowd, even after you see their attacks coming after you. When combined with the myriad effects the player is throwing out, the individual elements become extremely hard to differentiate from one another.

Most other aspects of the game are inoffensive, if not a bit underwhelming. The music and sound design are serviceable, but nothing particularly stands out. The designs of the enemies and characters are lackluster, and nothing really changes between runs, even when you bump up the difficulty.

“Fine” is not a word I love to use when evaluating a game. I want to see the vision, I want to dive deeper into what the developers are trying to say or what they are trying to do. I want to feel the ways in which they have tweaked the game mechanically to create an engaging or fulfilling experience, and I want to take from a game just as much as it takes from me. 

Unfortunately, I do not feel that 20 Minutes Till Dawn has provided anything that sets it apart from an already crowded bullet heaven field. The lack of progression systems, muddied visuals, and competent gameplay systems all blend to form something that works, but doesn't really leave a mark in the process. No need to stay up late to see this night through — just rest and find something else to play in the morning.

Image Credits: Erabit, flanne