ST. LOUIS — Upon returning to his favorite roguelike, Enter the Gungeon, local gamer Tyler Merck sat up in his chair before starting up another arduous, hour-long run of the game’s Wiki community.
“These games are so punishing, sometimes they send you all the way back to the front page of the fandom Wiki page,” Merck said. “Every time I fire up the game again I prepare myself for a long, difficult journey through the Wikipedia’s various subsections and tier lists. A lot of the time, I don’t even get past the first boss dropdown menu. That’s how tough these games can be.”
Enter the Gungeon streamer Ryan Cleghorn said that mastering the Wikipedia page is the best way to start playing the game.
“I’ve been livestreaming Gungeon every day for almost three years straight now, and I’m proud to say I’ve almost completed my first run of the game,” Cleghorn told reporters. “There are a lot of setbacks, every time I get a new item or gun, I check the in-game description and laugh at the silly one-liner or reference, and then it dawns on me that I have no actual information about the item or its mechanics. Each time I finish reading an article on the Wiki, I foolishly close the tab, thinking ‘well, that settles that’ even though I know I’m going to have to Google something again in the very next room when I see a minigame I don’t recognize.”
The Enter the Gungeon Wiki creator claimed that often the wiki mimics the gungeon itself.
“Players are forced to navigate a dense, sprawling maze with new information and pitfalls constantly being thrown at them, and then once they close the Wikipedia page the game is also pretty difficult,” said Wiki editor Felicia Regan. “As they progress, they’re constantly unlocking new areas and bosses to read detailed dossiers about, and after hours and hours of prep and practice, you start to click through the wiki with relaxed ease.”
At press time, sources reported that Merck had finally defeated the third chamber of the game, unlocking a brand new section of the Wikipedia page for him to religiously peruse.
This is sponsored by Devolver Digital! If you like video games — especially indie games — and ESPECIALLY roguelike games — and if you haven’t played Enter the Gungeon, then you’ve screwed up! But there’s still time to correct your error. Grab it on Steam and spend the next few hours in the Gungeon (and in the Wiki page for it).
