Video Game / Enter the Gungeon

Kill your past; you've already damned your future.^note Clockwise, from top: The Beholster, The Marine, The Convict, The Pilot and The Hunter. Not shown are The Cultist, The Bullet, The Robot, and The Gunslinger.

"Throughout the galaxy, a legend is told. On a distant planet, a grim fortress stood, until a deadly force parted the heavens and descended upon the keep. Though brought to ruin, the ashes of that place hold an artifact of impossible power. A gun that can kill the past. Over time, the fortress was rebuilt, and some who hear the legend would risk everything for another shot. To claim their prize and make what was done, undone, they must... (cue Title Drop)"

— Opening narration

Enter the Gungeon is a Bullet Hell Run-and-Gun Roguelike developed by Dodge Roll Games and published by Devolver Digital.

There is a legend told throughout the galaxy — many years ago, a massive bullet fell from space and crashed somewhere on a distant planet called Gunymede. This bullet formed the Gungeon, a sprawling, shape-shifting fortress protected by the Cult of the Gundead. Within the Gungeon, say these legends, lies a weapon of unimaginable power: a gun that can kill the past. And so it is that adventurers, known as Gungeoneers, flock to the Gungeon, seeking to right the wrongs of their pasts... if they can make it past the Gungeon's many traps and terrors...

Enter the Gungeon borrows equally from the Roguelike and Bullet Hell genres: it has the core gameplay of the former (multiple randomly generated runs, acquiring permanent buffs, Permadeath, etc.), but marries it with the More Dakka attack patterns (from both you and the enemies) of the latter. Add in the ability to dodge roll out of the way of projectiles, flip tables to create cover, and more guns than you can shake a mag at, and you've got Enter the Gungeon.

The game received a free content update by the name of Supply Drop in the early weeks of 2017, which re-added content cut from the game before release due to time constraints. The update includes new rooms, guns, bosses, and much more. Another free update named Advanced Gungeons & Dragons launched on July 19th 2018, bringing with it new guns and items, new rooms, hundreds of new item synergies, and a new secret area. The final update, A Farewell to Arms, was released on April 5th, 2019, bringing with it a whole bunch of new additions; including two new playable characters, new guns and items, a new secret floor & boss, and a host of other features.

The game was originally launched on Steam and the PlayStation 4 on April 5th, 2016, before receiving releases on the Xbox One exactly one year after its original release on April 5th, 2017, and on the Nintendo Switch on December 14th, 2017.

A sequel/spin-off known as Exit the Gungeon was announced September 11th 2019 and released on Apple Arcade, as well on PC and consoles in 2020. An arcade spin-off game inspired by House of the Dead called House of the Gundead was also released that same year.

See also Wizard with a Gun, another gun-centric Roguelike, though it's a survival game rather than an action roguelike.

This game provides examples of:

• 1-Up:
  • The Pig item is one proper, as it will revive you on the spot with full health when you take fatal damage. The Ration works similarly, but only restores partial health, and can be consumed before death to heal instead.
  • The Clone item works a bit differently, reviving you but putting you back at the beginning of the first floor. However, you keep all items collected in the run so far, making it more of a New Game Plus for the same run.
  • The Gun Soul also grants a revive, but is the hardest to use and has the most complex mechanics. On death, it sends the player back to the start of the current floor with all but one heart container gone and every enemy in every room respawned. However, reaching the point one died originally without dying again will return all their (now-empty) heart containers, as well as recharge the Gun Soul itself; assuming the player never dies twice without first recovering their hearts, the Gun Soul can be used an unlimited number of times, whereas the other extra life items are consumed on use.
• Abnormal Ammo: Pretty much the entire premise of the game. Some examples include: A T-shirt cannon that fires poisonous shirts, a bullet that shoots pistols, a shotgun shell that shoots shotguns, a wooden gun that shoots explosive wooden grenades, a spinal column that shoots ghosts, the letter r that shoots the word "bullet", a banana that explodes into more bananas on contact, an oxygen tank that shoots sharks, a pillow that shoots zippers, and a dinosaur skull that shoots oil (and breathes fire on reloading).
• Action Bomb:
  • Pinheads are walking grenades whose only attack is to lunge at the player and explode. A smaller version of them, the Grenat, will fire itself at the player as a dodgeable explosive bullet.
  • Nitras are walking dynamite sticks twice as tall as Pinheads, and rather than just going up in one explosion, they go up in an entire line of them. If they detonate themselves, the line is aimed at the player, but if they kill the Nitra themselves, the line is aimed away from them, ideally at other enemies. The R&G Dept features unique Nitras shaped like firecrackers that explode into even longer lines.
  • Shotgun Kin have a chance to burst into a spread of pellets on death. Stronger variants of them do it more often, with the strongest Veteran and Mutant variants being guaranteed to do so.
• Adorable Evil Minions: The Bullet-kin are still pretty cute even though they're all trying to kill you. All but one, that is.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: The Wallmonger, who is also an Advancing Wall of Doom. It will One-Hit KO the player if it reaches the opposite wall before getting killed.
• A.K.A.-47: Played with. Some real-world guns are present, including the AK-47, the Winchester Rifle, and the Colt 1851, while others are similar-looking guns renamed to avoid trademark disputes. This even extends to one of the Joke Weapons; the Mega Douser appears to be molded after the original 1990 "Power Drencher", better known as the precursor to the Super Soaker. There's also a gun called the JK-47 that's really an AK-47-shaped noodle with a slower fire rate than the real one, the AKey-47, which shoots keys that can unlock chests, and the VertebraeK-47, a weaponized spinal column that chain-fires ghosts which chase down enemies.
• Animate Inanimate Object: One of the vendors, Flynt, is a sapient lock, while one of the modifier-offering characters, Daisuke, is a walking, talking D20. There's also Gunther, a living, talking gun. And of course, there are the numerous gun- and ammunition-themed enemies you'll be facing during your runs.
• Annoying Arrows: Averted, surprisingly enough for a game that's all about guns. The Hunter's crossbow is very powerful, able to one-shot lesser bullet kin in the early levels (when it usually takes three or more hits from any of the pistols you start with). There are other crossbows and a few bows, which are nothing to sneeze at, either. The one drawback they have is that most of them have, logically, only one shot per load (except for the Shotbow, which also launches arrow scattershots), making them slow to shoot, but that's pretty much it. The one weapon that comes close to playing this trope straight is the Charmed Bow, which is indeed weaker than the other bows, but the trade-off is that it charms enemies into fighting for you, making it very useful anyway.
  • Played straight with the Arrowkin, primeval forms of the Bullet Kin that are only seen when The Devolver or Devolver Rounds devolve enemies. They shoot arrows instead of bullets, which hurt as much as bullets do but travel much slower, and are fired much less frequently.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Most quests, including the main Fetch Quest, will have their progress saved in-between runs. Because of this, you don't have to start a quest all over again if you die.
    • Adding to this, you can pay the cost for the Gnawed Key that's required to get to the Resourceful Rat's Nest in installments that carry over though runs till you pay 1000 shells. Afterwards, it simply costs 115 shells in future runs.
  • You start with a weapon that has infinite ammo and can't be sold or dropped, so you always have a fighting chance, even if you've emptied out all of your other weapons.
  • Each floor has fast travel points in certain rooms (particularly the entrance of the boss room and the shop) that are unlocked upon clearing the enemies in those rooms to prevent backtracking being a total chore.
    • Probably the biggest expression of this is the existence of a fast travel point in the lair of a boss that fights in a particularly large boss room. You can't fast travel during combat, so the teleport point is purely there for if the battle took you far away from the exit door and you don't feel like walking all the way back after you win.
  • Flipped tables will destroy bullets just in front of it when they get destroyed so that you're not caught out by bullets that come in a heavy stream or forced to count how many hits said table has left. That said, the range on it is extremely minuscule, so you still need to be on your toes and ready to dodge.
  • Upon clearing a room, all currency dropped by enemies immediately gravitate towards you, ensuring that you won't miss a single casing and saving you the trouble of doing a lap around every room to pick up every casing that drops.
  • Edge Gravity kicks in during the tumble after hitting the floor from a dodge roll, so that you don't end up rolling off into pits. Very helpful when jumping towards small or narrow platforms.
  • The game really doesn't want you to miss out on Hegemony Credits. Should they fall into a pit, they'll respawn near you. And if you decide to leave towards the exit without collecting them, they'll instantly warp into your inventory.
  • If you dodge roll into an explosive barrel, it'll break harmlessly instead of exploding in your face.
  • The shop is guaranteed to stock at least one key if you enter it before picking up a key on that floor, nearly guaranteeing a chance at opening the chamber's chests or locked doors. While this was somewhat mitigated by the fact that shops could sometimes generate with a locked door themselves, the Advanced Gungeons and Draguns made it so shops can no longer generate locked, and also made it so the first two shops will always stock at least one key no matter what.
  • Along the same lines, the game takes care to ensure that you are supplied with a new gun by the end of each chamber. If you haven't picked up a gun by the time you defeat the boss, the boss drop is guaranteed to be a new weapon.
  • As of the Supply Drop update, you can now save and quit the game at the end of a floor. Prior to this update, the absence of this feature was often maligned by people who had to abort runs when real life came a'calling.
  • You can open the Ammonomicon at any point and read up on the various items and what they do, as well as flavor text. If you do so during an active game, it will offer pages on all items you currently own, removing any (or some depending on the item) of the guesswork on what an item will do.
  • While the Resourceful Rat will steal most items if you leave the room without picking them up, he won't take keys, health pickups, blanks, or Hegemony Credits. He will steal ammo, though, which is really annoying.
  • Failing far too many times at Challenge Mode will result in the price for playing it going down from 6 Hegemony Credits to only a single Credit, as well as unlocking the Chaos Bullets for future runs.
  • Table Tech Money grants you some money whenever you flip a table. To save players some tedium, this also goes ahead and flips every other table in the room, usually in the same direction as the first one you flipped.
  • After you enter The Oubliette for the first time, the game will provide some assistance on further runs to help you reach it again, by adding a second movable water barrel to the fireplace room, on top of the first one that can generate in a random place on the floor.
  • Right as the Dodge Roll logo appears during the startup sequence, you can press Q (or Y on controllers) to skip the startup and immediately start a run with your most recently played character. If you have a Suspend Save stored, Quick Start will load it up for you.
  • The Punch-Out!!-esque phase of the Resourceful Rat fight has these as it's such a radical shift in gameplay:
    • Getting into this minigame for the first time will prompt you to do all possible moves, and the controls for the minigame are separate from the usual Bullet Hell controls.
    • Before the battle begins, the 2-minute timer won't start until you punch the Rat first.
    • Losing this minigame won't end your run, and you'll still be awarded with all the items you managed to get from it before being knocked out. The Rat will leave a note mocking you, though.
  • The Tinker's sidequest to open up shortcuts is surprisingly flexible. While you have to give him all the materials for a given request at once, he'll actually accept materials for future requests if you happen to have them handy and know what he'll want in advance (e.g. handing him a Master Round while he's currently asking for 3 pieces of armor). The only exceptions are the Hegemony Credits, since they're the only material that can be accumulated over multiple runs.
  • If you're maxed out on health, you can press "use" on any health pickups you find to "save" them for later. They can be claimed from a vending machine that appears at the shop and floor exit of the current floor for free later, when you actually need them. They're also dispensed in half-heart increments even if full hearts were picked up, preventing waste.
  • The Advanced Gungeons and Draguns update added a few quality-of-life improvements. The above was one, and another was adding teleporter pads to the treasure rooms and the elevator entrances. The latter activates immediately upon beating the boss, rather than waiting for you to actually go through the doorway, saving time if you have any loose ends to tie up before moving on.
  • If you kill an enemy by dropping them down a pit, any shells they'd drop are also lost when they fall down the pit. Killing an enemy with damage output and then having its corpse drop down a pit, however, has the shells pop back up at your feet, so you don't waste the bullets to get a kill and then lose the shells to a pit.
  • The trophies and unlockables for beating the different modes only require you to clear the Forge, not the current character's Past or Bullet Hell.
  • In the off-chance that you receive the Dueling Laser during a blessed run, it will recharge much faster than it normally would, so that you're not left at a huge disadvantage.
• Anti Poop-Socking: A Downplayed example. Once a character runs out of health, you are shown the time of day, and it reminds you of how long you just played by rewinding to the time at the start of your run, before the character gets shot and dies.
• Arrange Mode:
  • Since the Supply Drop update, by talking to Daisuke in the Breach and paying 6 Hegemony credits (1 if you beat the High Dragun in this mode or attempt the mode 30 times), you can enable the Challenge mode, where each room has 1-3 modifiers^ExamplesKilled enemies come back as Hollowpoints, enemies release suicide bullets when killed, etc., and boss rooms have unique modifiers that modify their patterns as well. Beating the High Dragun in Challenge Mode rewards you with Double Challenge mode, which doubles the amount of modifiers in each room, as well as Chaos Bullets.
  • Talking to Tonic the Sledge-Dog in the Breach gives you the Turbo modifier introduced in the Supply Drop update, which boosts the game's speed.
  • In A Farewell to Arms, talking to Bowler in the Breach allows you to access the Rainbow Mode, wherein each floor starts you off with a rainbow chest (giving you the choice of one of eight high-tier items), but nearly all other methods of earning items are disabled.
• Ascended Extras: The tie-in comic that comes with the Collector's Edition stars Frifle and Grey Mauser, the two NPCs that just give you hunting quests in the actual game.
• Attack Its Weak Point: After it Turns Red, the High Dragun's heart is the only area you can shoot at to further damage the boss. Of course, the heart only appears after the boss uses its last attack.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Some of the A- and S-ranked guns can fall into this territory. These are easily some of the most powerful firearms you can find in the game, but often have low ammo counts (or high ammo consumption) that limit how helpful they can be during your Gungeon travels. As ammo drops aren't a guarantee, they're typically saved for the boss fights.
  • This is made worse by the hidden "magnificence" mechanic. When picking up an A or S ranked item or gun, it will increase your magnificence stat by one point, which drastically reduces your chance of finding other A and S ranked loot later in the run. This is permanent, and the point will remain even if said gun or item is dropped or sold. As a result, experienced players that find an underwhelming A or S ranked item or gun will often not pick it up, because chances are they will get much better stuff later in the run and don't want to reduce said chance.
  • The S-ranked Super Hot Watch drastically slows time to nearly a standstill when you aren't moving, which gives you as much time as you could desire to avoid bullets. Unfortunately, this also applies to shooting your guns. You need to either be moving or continuously swapping guns in order to effectively unload a clip into an enemy, not ideal when you've gotten into a good position or are otherwise surrounded by bullets.
  • The Gun Soul is an A-ranked passive item that provides an extra heart container and grants you the ability to revive after death multiple times. The only catch? You respawn at the entrance with only a single heart container, and all cleared rooms are reset. You can retrieve your (empty!) heart containers if you can reach the point where you originally died. Good luck navigating the chamber that killed you with a single heart, low ammo stocks, and no refunded blanks.
• Backwards-Firing Gun: The Gun That Can Kill the Past. It's a revolver with the barrel bent back towards the shooter. Rather than killing or harming the user, however, it allows them to travel backwards in time; when empty, it sends them back a few hours, but when loaded with special, magical bullets, it can send the user much further back to a point in time of their choosing.
• Batter Up!: A weapon you can come across is Casey, a baseball bat which can reflect bullets and send enemies out of the park. It's grouped in with the abundant D-class weapons, does a whopping 100 damage per hit, will launch enemies killed by a swing backwards with enough velocity to hurt or kill other enemies, and can even "shoot" a short-range fan of projectiles with the "Careful Iteration" synergy or the Flak Bullets item on top of the melee swing. However, it's slow to use, its short melee range makes it hard to use on bosses, and it will only start appearing in the Gungeon after being unlocked from Doug, a traveling merchant, for Hegemony Credits.
• Bee-Bee Gun: Bees are present in many weapons and items. When released, they will seek out the nearest enemy and deal damage until it drops dead or after enough time passes:
  • The Beehive is a gun that will continuously release bees as you hold the trigger.
  • You can throw a Jar of Bees.
  • The Honeycomb is a passive item that releases bees to defend you (and the hive you're carrying) when you take damage.
  • The Stinger, a rocket launcher inspired by its real-life equivalent — except for the part where its rockets release bees on impact.
  • The Bumbullets are a passive item that gives a chance to release bees with every bullets fired.
• BFG: Numerous, as to be expected, including an Expy of the Trope Namer itself.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • You will never have to use a key to open chests again if you wear the Mimic Tooth Necklace, because all chests are replaced with mimics. This CAN be actually beneficial, however, assuming you're good at fighting mimics.
  • Blessed Mode, as the name probably implies. Your starter gun will morph into other, usually-more-powerful weapons, but at complete random with minimal control over when it transforms or what it turns into; the player can be wielding the Raiden Coil one second, only for it to transform into the dinky Klobbie the next. You also can't pick up any other guns, as trying to do so will just immediately cause the random transformation effect to happen, meaning that any weapon drops are a complete waste compared to other items.
• Big Fancy Castle: The very first floor, Keep of the Lead Lord. It consists of libraries, courtyards, and even a room with a fancy fireplace which houses a secret switch to access The Oubliette. The corridors and the rooms are decked out with paintings, shields, suits of armor, and what look like gun-swords mounted on the walls. One of the bosses also fits the theme, the gun-throne riding Bullet King.
  • Notably, the next chamber is called "Gungeon Proper", implying that the Keep of the Lead Lord isn't actually part of the Gungeon, but was built on top of it.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: A few weapons, or even otherwise-lethal items, are fairly blinged out.
  • The AU Gun, as it name implies, is a gun made of solid gold. It fires a single high-damage bullet with good accuracy, but must reload after every shot and only holds 22 bullets in reserve.
  • Old Goldie, a gold-trimmed shotgun that increases all your damage and adds +1 to your luck (or "coolness") stat while being held, on top of packing a punch on its own. Oddly, despite being referred to as a double-barreled shotgun, it has a magazine size of 4.
  • The Gilded Hydra, another golden shotgun. Although it starts with only one shot per reload, each missing half-heart the player has gives it another shot in the magazine until the missing health is healed.
  • If the player has Ser Junkan following them and finds a piece of Gold Junk, picking it up will grant him a mech suit that's solid gold from head to toe, referred to as "Mecha Junkan". Unsurprisingly, he becomes very lethal in this form.
  • Not a weapon itself, but an ammo type; Gilded Bullets are bullets topped by a gold-and-red crown. While held, the player receives a damage bonus based on how much money they currently have.
• Blob Monster: Blobulons and all their variations.
• Body Horror:
  • The Mutation weapon, which turns one of your arms into a pulsating mass of flesh that spews a powerful blood beam. Its Ammonomicon entry states that it is a consequence of radiation exposure.
  • The VertebraK-47 is a dead adventurer's spine strapped to a gun frame. It shoots vengeful ghosts. Even the game calls this thing an abomination.
  • The aptly-named Mutant Bullet Kin, a common Bullet Kin found in certain harder floors, with an asymmetric hunchback and a screwed-up face that sometimes stop to vomit up pool of poison creep to the side. Tellingly of their condition is that any enemy hit by the Big Boy active item, which launches a nuclear missile, is mutated into one of these.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Marine isn't as fancy as the other characters, but he starts off with an accurate sidearm, has armor that lets him take an extra hit, and his military training means he reloads faster and is more accurate.
  • Many of the guns. A good old revolver might not be as wacky as a gun that shoots homing skulls, but it'll get the job done just as well if not better.
  • Many synergies simply improve a gun's stats without adding any gimmicks. Sure, increasing magazine size and reload speed isn't very fancy, but it can make any weapon much better.
  • Each character's starting weapons. They don't have any special abilities, but they have infinite ammo and can whittle down already weak enemies.
  • Blanks. They're cheap, available in most stores, and you get up to two^note (plus one for each type of Ammolet or the White Guon Stone) for free on each floor.
• Boss-Only Level:
  • Almost all of the character pasts consist of nothing more than a short story-related sequence, followed by a boss fight. The exceptions to this are Convict's and Bullet's pasts, as they each have a small group of enemies to deal with before facing the boss (Bullet's past has two bosses back-to-back).
  • Opening a glitch chest will result in you being instantly sent to the next floor, except it only contains one room with two Beholsters.
• Boss Rush: This game features one as an unlockable game mode, where you face every normal boss in the game up to the High Dragun. The Past bosses, Optional Bosses, and the True Final Boss are all excluded from this mode. It's free to play on your first try, but every time after that will cost you 3 Hegemony Credits (defeating bosses in this mode won't grant Hegemony Credits, unlike normal).
• Boss Subtitles: Each boss has one, e.g. Gatling Gull is a "rapid fire raptor", and the Bullet King sits "in the lead throne".
• Bragging Rights Reward: The Finished Gun, unlocked after unlocking most items in the game ^note Number Two, which requires playing co-op, and High Dragunfire, which is extremely rare and does not have an Ammonomicon entry, are not required. It's a revolver that quickly fires high damage bullets, and the final shot of each magazine is a larger bullet that deals more damage and reflects enemy bullets. While not the most powerful weapon in the game DPS-wise, this gun will still make short work of any enemy and will make it nearly impossible for bosses to hit you.
• Breakable Power-Up: You can have multiple Glass Guon Stones which orbit around you and block bullets, but break if you take any kind of damage.
• Breakout Mook Character: The Bullet, an unlockable Gungeoneer that is the same as the Bullet Kin that you'll be gunning down by the hundreds on every run, but can also dodge roll and use more than one gun by virtue of being playable.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Bullet Hell.
  • For that matter, the two secret levels, The Oubliette and the Abbey of the True Gun, feature some enemies you'll only otherwise see in the Forge and Bullet Hell. Except they occur very close to the start of the game when you have very little equipment. You're likely to have only one random gun plus your starting loadout when you enter the first of the two.
  • Yet another secret level, ???, more commonly known as Resourceful Rat's Lair, also qualifies, despite being accessible later. Not only do you have to spend a lot of money for an artifact to even access it, perhaps preventing you from acquiring more guns and artifacts for getting stronger, but is also a Timed Mission that features hard enemy layouts and is impossible to navigate without clues. Should you manage to reach the boss, you'll find that it's a Superboss that the bosses of previous secret floors pale in comparison to, with attack patterns and tricks sure to test your mettle and the final phase that plays nothing like the rest of the game. All in all, even harder to tackle without preparation, but it does feature unique loot seen nowhere else as a prize.
• Bullet Hell: Follows a lot of the genre conventions, with enemies using intricate yet slow-moving bullet patterns. Bosses especially tend to have danmaku bullet patterns. It's also the name of the final secret level.
  • A few item and enemy descriptions in the Ammonomicon contain the phrase "(from) beyond the Curtain." This is a reference to the Japanese term for the Bullet Hell genre: Danmaku (a compound word meaning "barrage" and made up of the words "Bullet" and "Curtain").
• But Thou Must!:
  • In every character's past, you have the option to try and repeat the very action that ruined their lives in the first place, but something always prevents you from going through with it, locking you to the main path. The Convict's plays this trope even more straight, as the options are basically the same.
  Teach [the bad guys] a lesson. <Flip desk>
  Teach [the bad guys] a lesson again. <Flip desk>
  • Also played straight for The Robot's past, as choosing to refuse the protocol of taking on the Last Human results in "command not found".
• Canine Companion: The Hunter has a dog known as "Junior II" that can occasionally dig up items and will warn you if a chest is a Mimic. At any time, the player can press "use" near Junior II to pet him. You can unlock the first Junior by killing the Hunter's past, and he'll seek out and attack enemies instead of digging up consumables.
• Cast from Money: The Microtransaction Gun uses your money as ammo.
• Charged Attack: Many weapons in the game need to charge before firing.
• Chekhov's Skill: Three of the four player characters use a skill they learned in the Gungeon to defeat their past. The Hunter uses a Blank to destroy the trap her nemesis trapped her with, the Convict uses Table Flip to surprise the soldiers, and the flavour text for the HS Absolution states that the Pilot used the Dodge Roll to take it down.
• The Chessmaster: It's implied that The Lich orchestrated the events within the Gungeon to facilitate his escape from Bullet Hell.
• Chest Monster: As of its final update, Enter the Gungeon has a large variety of mimics, though — unsurprisingly — the most common types disguise themselves as chests. Some items will warn you preemptively if a nearby chest is a mimic, like Junior II barking at them, and they can be told apart by seeing if the chest is "breathing". Or you can just shoot the chest once with a low-powered pistol, which will cause it to reveal itself if it's a mimic or leave the chest undamaged enough to open if it's not. Other variants include the following:
  • Wall Mimics take the form of giant slabs of concrete and, as their name implies, disguise themselves as chunks of wall until the player gets close enough; they attack with dual pistols, just like normal mimics do, but also slam the ground with their faces to send out waves of bullets. Unlike chest mimics, they can't be spotted ahead of time.
  • Pedestal Mimics disguise themselves as the ornate item pedestals that appear after boss fights. In addition to chasing the player around and firing bullets as normal, they also occasionally spit up projectiles resembling items, such as boots or revolvers. Compared to real item pedestals, they're shorter, darker, have different "text" on the front, and said text occasionally "blinks" its "eyes".
  • On extremely rare occasion (a 0.1% chance to be exact), any gun you pick up will turn into the Mimic Gun instead. Although it has piercing bullets and an enormous ammo reserve, it's only about as strong as a D-class pistol otherwise. It cannot be switched off of or dropped until a random amount of damage is dealt to enemies using it, or an ammo pickup is "fed" to it, whereupon it will turn back into the gun it was disguised as originally.
• Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: Use the Spice, and additional Spice items will occasionally spawn in future shops, chests, and even item pedestals. Hell, even the Marine's Supply Drop can spawn Spice instead of ammo. Each time you use one, the frequency that this happens ramps up more. Even if you stop at two, as you begin to lose maximum health with the third dose and beyond, the sheer number of Spices that spawn instead of potentially useful items becomes a problem in itself. This can actually be beneficial if the Sell Creep is on the floor, as you can give him excess Spice for quite a large sum of shells.
• The Computer Shall Taunt You:
  • "Your own slow reflexes" is displayed if you're killed by something, but the game can't figure out who or what did it (such as when the enemy is killed after firing it).
  • Inverted when you beat the final boss, the game says you were killed by "Nobody! You did great!"
  • Dying to the Resourceful Rat nets you various insults on the death screen, ranging from "Hubris" to "Your sad lack of skill".
• Crate Expectations: They don't contain anything, but they can take a single hit from a bullet, making them decent short-term cover. Except, of course, the crate dropped in by the Supply Drop item, which breaks open to reveal a full ammo restore.
• Creepy Circus Music: Winchester's shooting gallery minigame plays music that wouldn't be out of place at a carnival (it is in fact a sped-up version of Scott Joplin's "Searchlight Rag"), but the light distortion and off-putting key makes it sound slightly deranged. Not helping is the fact that the room plays a terrible drone when the game isn't being played.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: The only feasible way to unlock the Drill and Clown Mask and allow them to be found in chests is, befitting the game they're referencing, to steal them from under the Shopkeeper's nose because they otherwise cost more casings than you can actually have in an average run.
• Deal with the Devil: Sometimes, you can come across a shrine dedicated to "a prideful Bullet angel, now fallen". You can offer the shrine a heart container in exchange for a permanent damage increase.
• Desperation Attack: Invoked by the Gilded Hydra, a very powerful shotgun-type weapon whose magazine size increases by 1 every time its wielder takes damage.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The Bullet. Not only are they immune to contact damage and their dodge roll deals more damage when they roll into an enemy, their sword is the highest-damage starting weapon in the game, able to one or two-shot most enemies well into the late game and destroy projectiles. The catch is that, normally, the sword shoots powerful sword beams that can deal great damage, but can only do so at full health. Getting hit at all means resorting to melee to deal damage, and in a game where only a select few enemies don't shoot bullets (and lots of them), it's very risky. (The sword can erase bullets that it strikes when swung^note an ability shared by most melee weapons that don't reflect bullets instead, but it can't protect you from entire barrages by itself, especially in the late game, unless upgrade items are found that let it swing faster.)
  • There's also the Alien Engine. It dishes out some of the highest DPS in the game and sets targets on fire, but it chews through ammo in the blink of an eye, has a very limited hit range, and has such massive recoil that it will blast you far away from your target the second you start firing it. Unless you come across the Heavy Boots, which eliminate the recoil, making it less Awesome, but Impractical, although you still have to stay close to enemies to damage them.
  • Another is the Rad Gun, a gun with a baseball cap and a skateboard. It starts out very weak, but enables active reloads (each reload can be made faster with a quick time event) and each successful active reload increases the damage of the weapon. After four successful reloads, your bullets will have sunglasses and be absolutely deadly, able to one- or two-shot many enemies, even in the late-game. The catch? Each time you do a successful active reload, the reload time gets faster, making it harder to pull off an active reload. If you mess up, the counter resets and the gun goes back to weak bullets and a really slow reload.
  • Yet another example is Casey, which is basically just a baseball bat. As such, it doesn't actually fire any bullets of its own (by default), and can only be used to hit things at a close range. However, it deals ridiculous damage, able to one-shot virtually any enemy, including heavily armored ones such as Gun Nuts. Plus, it can reflect bullets right back at whoever shot them, at high speed. If you can catch a bunch of bullets in one swing, it can prove extremely deadly. For example, smacking the Bullet King at the same moment he fires off a ring of bullets will take out nearly half his health!
• Disk-One Final Boss: The High Dragun is the first "final boss" by default, before you complete the Fetch Quest to assemble the Bullet That Can Kill the Past. Without the Bullet, entering the Aimless Void after the Dragun's fight and using the Gun That Can Kill the Past just ends the run instead of progressing the player to The Past.
• Double Unlock: Unlocking an item or a gun doesn't give access to it right away. You'll have to find it in the Gungeon mid-run to see what it does!
• Deadly Ringer: The Mine Flayer boss uses a bell in many of its attacks, ringing it to shoot rings of bullets at the player or hiding under it and spawning decoy bells.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • A co-op run has an alternate ending if the Cultist is shot with the Gun that Can Kill the Past instead of player 1's character, where both players fight over who becomes the main character.
  • The iBomb Companion App detonates all explosives in the room. This includes not only enemies who explode on death, but also certain projectiles fired from guns such as the Grenade Launcher.
  • If you try to cheese the fights against the High Dragun or the Lich's second phase by flying behind them, the game will spawn an unavoidable wave of bullets in order to force you onto the main arena.
  • In the tutorial level, Ser Manuel is surprisingly interactive:
    • When Ser Manuel instructs you to kick some tables around, he will react if you instead break the other props scattered throughout the room. He will also comment if you dodge roll, since he's supposed to teach you that later.
    • Once you get a weapon, trying to shoot Ser Manuel will elicit many responses from him depending on the situation. For example, shooting him right before his boss battle will cause him to say stuff such as "not yet" or "I wasn't ready."
  • If you have the Mimic Tooth Necklace^note which turns all chests into Mimics and defeat the Resourceful Rat, a unique Mimic NPC will show up and mention that he represents the Mimic Union, and states that since they’re stretched thin as-is, they cannot replace the special chests since they aren’t up to code, forcing you to earn the keys from the Resourceful Rat the hard way.
• Dual Boss: The Trigger Twins, a pair of giant bullets with contrasting dispositions. The Kill Pillars up the ante by being a Quadruple Boss.
  • The Gunslinger's past is a fight against the first form of the Lich with a jammed copy of the Lich.
• Duct Tape for Everything: Present both in form of an active item that lets you combine two different guns together, which combines their maximum ammo count and lets you fire both of them at the same time, as well as the passive Backup Gun, which takes the form of a pistol taped to your back that fires a duplicate of your currently used gun in a direction opposite of what you're aiming your main gun at.
• Dungeon Bypass: If you complete the Tinker's sidequests, you'll be able to start the game from the second chamber or further down, depending on how many elevators you've helped to fix.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Everyone, if you kill their pasts. The Pilot saves his partner and best friend from the Hegemony battleship, The Marine saves his squad from an Eldritch Abomination and is hailed as a hero, The Convict escapes to a life of paradise with a fortune of her bribe money, The Hunter defeats her nemesis and escapes from being cryogenically frozen, The Robot prevents humanity from overthrowing an army of robots, and The Bullet saves the Gungeon from being ruled by an even more evil force. The Gunslinger, on the other hand, prevents the Bullet from falling from the skies, and therefore prevents the creation of the Gungeon entirely, which means that no one will ever be trapped there.
  • Averted with the Cultist. If they manage to kill the other Gungeoneer (in an attempt to take their place as the player 1), they'll realize that doing so makes them the villain.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: A good gun will be enough to down most enemies, but the bosses' health-scaling mechanic will force you to focus less on your damage and more on their Bullet Hell patterns. It doesn't help that Master Rounds, which are rather beneficial HP-increasing items, can only be obtained by not getting hit during boss fights.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Marine's past boss is this. It summons demonic minions and warps reality around it, making portions of the floor poisonous.
• Eldritch Location: The Gungeon is implied to be one; it apparently exists outside of spacetime itself, twists the local wildlife into gun-wielding mutants, raises the dead, and transforms anything even remotely gun-shaped or related to guns into extremely deadly weapons (not to mention continually resurrecting those who explore it and trapping them inside in a Stable Time Loop until they manage to kill their pasts).
• Emergency Weapon: Every character's starting weapon has infinite ammo, so you'll always have something to fall back on should you run dry all your other weapons.
• The Empire: The Imperial Hegemony of Man, which is mentioned in the descriptions of several items.
• Energy Weapon: Most beam type weapons are these. Some enemies, such as the Beholster, also attack with these.
• Epic Fail: One of the Bullet's relatives tried to "aim and fire" their ancestral weapon, a sword… and ended up stabbing himself in the head. How exactly that happened is a good question. And how did he even try to "aim and fire" a sword, anyway?
• Encyclopedia Exposita: The Ammonomicon provides a description of every item, weapon, enemy, and boss you've discovered throughout the game.
• Evolving Weapon: The Polaris is a gun which starts out fairly weak, but starts dealing more damage as it is used to kill enemies. Taking damage sets its power back a level; this is a reference to Cave Story and its weapon system, as the Polaris is based on the game's default weapon.
  • Gunther is the S-rank version of this. It just deals modest damage when first acquired, but as the player clears rooms, its bullets gain power and additional properties (ricochets, then homing). Unlike the Polaris, these changes do not ever get reverted. It's even got infinite ammo!
  • Played straight and literally with the Evolver; A gun that gets more powerful as it kills unique enemies, changing in form from an amoeba, to a sponge, to a flatworm, to a snail, to a frog, to a dragon.
  • The Gunderfury is probably the ultimate example of this: it gains experience based on the maximum HP of the enemies killed when it's in the inventory and levels up as a result, changing forms every 10 levels, starting from a shotgun and then further evolving into a rapid-fire rifle, followed by a laser rifle and once it reaches the maximum level of 60, it rapidly shoots 2 powerful beams at the same time. As a result, it's one of the strongest guns in the game when maxed out.
• Exact Words: The Mimic Tooth Necklace item's description states that it "unlocks all chests". To its credit, it does. What it doesn't tell you is that it does so by turning them into Mimics. Thankfully, Mimics in this game drop items upon their deaths, so it's not that bad.
• Exploding Barrels: A common obstacle throughout the game; in addition to standard red barrels that just explode, there are orange barrels that set the ground on fire, green barrels that leave puddles of poison, violet barrels that leave puddles of oil, and blue barrels that leave puddles of water. They can be kicked in any direction to better position them, or as a distraction, since most enemies will automatically shoot actively-rolling barrels.
• Eyepatch of Power: Literally. The Eyepatch item increases your damage, at the cost of your accuracy.
• Fantastic Firearms: The game has a weapon that's a bundle of magic wands on a pistol grip, and its big brother which uses wizard staves on a sniper rifle receiver. Furthermore, it features all sorts of random junk enchanted by a mad wizard to make them act like guns, including pillows, mailboxes, cubes made out of bricks...
• Fantasy Gun Control: Inverted. While there are plenty of fantasy-themed monsters, all of them are packing heat. Additionally, melee weapons, such as swords, are considered sacrilegious by the Gungeon's denizens, and possession of guns with melee functionalities will increase the chance of encountering souped-up foes.
• Fetch Quest: This is a part of the story, as the Gun That Can Kill The Past won't work if you don't collect four specific items and bring them to an NPC in the fifth chamber, who then uses them to make a special bullet for it. Fortunately, once you bring an item to that NPC, she will keep it for the rest of the game.
• Feathered Fiend: Gatling Gull, a giant purple-feathered bird with the torso of a very buff human that carries around a minigun and can vomit missiles. He normally appears as one of three possible bosses at the end of Chamber 1, but if the player has the Ticket item, they can summon him to help fight other enemies, now on your side.
  • There's also Gigi, a much smaller orange bird that appears as a common enemy. They attack by vomiting up an egg that then splits into a cluster of bullets aimed at the player, which spread out further the farther they travel.
• Feather Fingers: The photo that appears in the Ammonomicon when The Pilot kills his past is one of him clinking glasses with a feather-fingered avian person, presumably Z from his past cutscene.
• Flame Spewer Obstacle: In some levels there are floor hazards that shoot out flames.
• Flintstone Theming: Oh yes. The game throws in nearly every possible gun-related joke there is. Gun-themed names, creatures, furniture, puns, everything. One item description theorizes that the Gungeon itself being so obsessed with guns warps reality and is the reason anything slightly gun-shaped becomes a real weapon (in that specific case, a mailbox).
• Flipping the Table: You can flip tables or coffins and use them as temporary cover. Some items even grant bonuses whenever either is flipped.
• Foreshadowing: When your character dies, cross-hairs depicting a rewinding clock rewind to your computer or console's system clock at the moment you started the Gungeon and fires. It's actually the Gun That Can Kill The Past. When you get it after defeating the High Dragun and traversing the Aimless Void, you shoot yourself with it to go to The Past, or if you instead go to Bullet Hell, you then use it to shoot the Lich after defeating him, obliterating him for good.
  • The silhouette on the title screen turns out to be the Gunslinger, the man who would later become the Lich, lord of the Gundead and the game's True Final Boss, with the gun in his hand presumably being his Slinger revolver. When you later unlock the Gunslinger and defeat the Lich as him, the victory screen shows the same shot as the title screen, but with the Gunslinger tossing his Slinger over his shoudler and walking away from the Gungeon.
  • Each of the four main gungeoneers' starting guns have a bit in the description that alludes to their past. The Hunter's gun is shiny and new despite being so old, just like her. The Marine's sidearm is "prone to failing when it's needed most" despite looking solid, and the large Marine was certainly needed when he took the escape pod. The Convict's gun is "cheaply made and prone to jams", just like her relationship with Black Stache, and the Pilot's Rogue Special "often gets itself into more trouble than it can handle", not to mention it was given to him by his partner and "has never let him down". Unlike how he left his partner alone with the Hegemony Battlecruiser.
• From Shame, Heroism: The Pilot left his best friend to be captured by the law to save himself, and the Marine abandoned his squad rather than face down an Eldritch Abomination with them. Both of them are now braving the Gungeon in search of The Gun That Can Kill The Past in order to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• Gatling Good: Gatling Gull, again. The Vulcan Cannon, Machine Fist and Robot's Left Hand weapons let the player get in on the fun, while the Ticket item can summon an allied Gatling Gull to employ this trope in their stead.
• Gainax Ending: After you beat the True Final Boss, it's not really clear what's going on. You shoot him with the Gun That Can Kill The Past. What this accomplishes and why it sends your character where it does are unknown.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: The starting playable cast has two male cast (the Marine and Pilot) and two female (the Huntress and Convict). The Cultist is sometimes referred to as a "he", but just as often as a "they". The Bullet and the Robot are of genderless races. While the Paradox is surely genderless due to just being a walking time anomaly, the Gunslinger is unambiguously male, thus making this an Averted Trope in the end.
• Glamour Failure: The best way to identify a Chest Mimic among regular chests (besides shooting them) is to wait and see if it has a "snoring" or "breathing" animation. Similarly, Pedestal Mimics will occasionally "blink" and overall look different from real item pedestals (shorter, wrong color, different "text" on the front).
• Glass Cannon: Not any of the Gungeoneers, but a weapon you can find. It charges up a big yellow laser, doing huge damage and bypassing the innate defense bosses have, but it breaks if you take one hit, and can only be fixed by finding new ammo. If the player has any Glass Guon Stones however, they'll break first before the Glass Cannon itself does.
  • The Balloon Gun also counts. It fires miniature tornadoes that home in on and repeatedly hit enemies, grants its wielder flight while held, and becomes even stronger with its "Paper Lantern" or "Three Sheets" synergies, but will also instantly lose all its ammo if the player is hit while holding it.
• Gorgeous Gorgon: The Gorgun is your typical green medusa look-alike, except dual-wielding a pair of uzis.
• Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed: The Gungeoneers are all subjected to this in-game, especially The Marine, who is depicted as bigger than the others in the promo artwork.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Several Ammonomicon entries state that a few enemies (such as the Ashen Bullet/Shotgun Kin and the Kill Pillars) are controlled by some dark force, and the Drunkard reveals this dark force to be that of Kaliber, the seven-armed goddess of bullets. Though the entries may also be referencing The Lich, as his own Ammonomicon entry states the Gundead revere him as the immortal master of the Gungeon.
  • Upon accruing maximum curse points the player is relentlessly stalked by the Lord of the Jammed, who is responsible for the jammed Elite Mooks the player faces throughout the game and possibly for Lich's imprisonment in Bullet Hell.
• Grievous Bottley Harm: The Crestfaller synergizes with beverage-like items by causing you to chuck an empty bottle at an enemy when the gun is reloaded.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: It's possible to hit enemies into other enemies using the Casey. In particular, launching the Bullet King's Evil Chancellor at him with it is programmed to be a One-Hit KO.
• Guide Dang It!: All five chambers have a secret chamber to them apiece, but good luck figuring out how to get to them without a guide.
  • To get into The Oubliette, you need to find the fireplace that spawns in the Keep of the Lead Lord, extinguish the fire with a water barrel that can be found in a room somewhere on the floor, enter the fireplace and flip a switch that opens up a secret room in the level, and finally use two keys to open the grate in that secret room. There is absolutely no indication that you can do this, and you'll likely end up going in with hardly any weapons while facing enemies about as powerful as those in the third chamber, as well as a special boss.
    • Reaching The Abbey of the True Gun is even worse, since it's dependent on getting into the Oubliette. Inside the Oubliette, there's a special armor item, the Old Crest (which may or may not spawn behind a locked door that you may or may not have a key for), which appears to act like a normal armor pickup. However, if you can get through the rest of the Oubliette and at least some of the Gungeon Proper following it without taking any damage and place the crest on the shrine in the Gungeon Proper, you can finally open up the Abbey. The level has you facing enemies from the fourth chamber (two up from the Gungeon Proper where you entered from), plus an absolutely ball-grindingly brutal Superboss, and since you likely spent most of your keys on entering The Oubliette, you'll be lucky to have one or two decent weapons to fight with.
    • Advanced Gungeons and Draguns adds The Resourceful Rat's Nest, and it makes the last two look easy, as it has two layers of frustration. To even get to it, you must first pay 1000 shells for the Gnawed Key, which thankfully can be paid in installments in each run till it's paid for, then it's just 115 afterwards. Then you also need 2-3 Blanks and a normal key, find a room in the Black Powder Mine with rats running about and find a hidden trap door, go down it and ride a minecart. At the end of the ride, you must blank to reveal another secret chamber… and then use another blank to reveal a hidden chamber in the hidden chamber and use the Gnawed Key on the hatch in that room and you'll enter the Resourceful Rat's Nest. Think you're done? That was the easy part. The level itself is The Maze and a Timed Mission that, if you fail to get to the boss room in time, will boot you right into The Hollow. The only way to know how to get to the boss room in time is to find six Infuriating Notes in chests, each of which contains a step of which way to go. The directions are randomized for each player.
    • Making the Advanced Dragun appear is also frustrating. You need to beat the Resourceful Rat, meaning you must do all the above and find a secret room in the boss room and unlock two doors with two keys you get from the rat. Behind the door is a Serpent which must be fed three non-junk items or guns to awaken it. The serpent must be taken to the High Dragun boss and beat his normal two phases, after which the serpent fuses with the High Dragun to become the Advanced Dragun. Thankfully, beating the Resourceful Rat once unlocks the Weird Egg, which when placed in fire hatches the Serpent.
    • Thankfully, getting into R&G Dept is less frustrating. You need to just find a hidden room with a Sell Creep in The Hollow and give it a Master Round and two other items or guns. This will cause the grate to break and you enter to get to the floor.
    • Finding the Forge's secret chamber, Bullet Hell, is also quite easy, if not outright inevitable; after successfully conquering The Past as the Convict, Marine, Hunter, and Pilot, you will be pulled into a portal to Bullet Hell when you walk over the platform with the chamber logo on it in the Aimless Void, the next time you go there.
  • The way to unlock Table Tech Rocket is bizarrely obtuse if you have not looked at the achievements. Flip a table and push it into a pit.
  • There's a lot of secret interactions between items, mostly of the form "X is more effective if Y is in your inventory". These include logical interactions (ex. Junk boosting the Trash Cannon), Shout Outs to other media (reenacting the famous Super Metroid pre-final-boss scene with the Pig companion and Samus' arm cannon enables a synergy), puns (the musical Metronome synergizes with the ammo-holding Drum Clip), and some that appear arbitrary (the teapot special ability isn't compatible with all companions, only a subset of them). The game indicates when synergies happen with a blue arrow graphic, but doesn't tell what that synergy does.
• Guns Akimbo: The Hunter and Convict are portrayed with these in the Versus Character Splash, with the former wielding two Colt 1851's, and the latter using the Budget Revolver and the Sawed-Off Shotgun they start with. While there are some synergies that enable dual-wielding, neither of these are possible; the Colt 1851 can only be wielded with the Cold .45, while the Budget Revolver and Sawed-Off Shotgun cannot be held akimbo with eachother or anything else.
  • Some bosses get in on the action too, such as the Beholster, the Gorgun, or the High Dragun.
• Gun Porn: The game has over 200 guns with distinct sprites you can find in the Gungeon, ranging from real-world guns like the AK-47 and Winchester to crossbows to wacky weapons that shoot balloons, letters, and the like.
• Hailfire Peaks: A few of the chambers combine settings.
  • Chamber 1, The Keep of the Lead Lord, is full of armories, dining rooms, fireplaces, and moats, along with the occasional library full of flying books and bullet pattern-summoning Gunjurers.
  • Chamber 4, The Hollow, is a frozen graveyard. It's full of ice, bottomless pits, ghosts, zombies, and cursed enemies. This is also where Gunjurers tend to get more powerful.
  • Chamber 5, The Forge, is hot, full of lava both in its pits and flowing out of the walls. And it's not just for show, touching lava on the ground will set you on fire. It also has conveyor belts, crushers, and other moving machinery, along with being where The Blacksmith lives.
• Hand Cannon: There's a few of them, but the biggest (no pun intended) example is the Frost Giant, a pistol that is almost twice as big as the player character and fires bullets about as big as their entire bodies.
• Hearts Are Health: Technically, your health is represented by bullets, but red and crossed two at a time in such a way as to form hearts.
• Heart Container: Various heart-shaped items increase your health by one heart. Amusingly, while they're all "containers" of some kind, they are never explicitly called that. For example, the Heart Bottle, Heart Purse, Heart Holster...
  • If you defeat the floor boss without getting hit, you'll get a Master Round themed to that floor, which also function as these.
• Hellis That Noise: The strange, squelching sound of a Confirmed firing at the player, which is often heard before the enemy itself is seen.
• The Heretic: One of the secret unlockable characters; a sword-wielding Bullet Kin. The sword itself is even named Blasphemy, just to drive the point home.
  • The Fightsabre, being originally a sword (and still usable as such, though only in the silliest way possible), is considered highly heretical and merely picking it up gets you cursed. This is also the case with all weapons that can be construed as melee (with the notable exception of the above-mentioned Bullet Kin's sword Blasphemy, and more strangely the Pitchfork and Trident), including:
    • Casey, a bullet-deflecting baseball bat that swings slow but hits hard.
    • The Huntsman, a shotgun with an underbarrel axe-head that can knock bullets out of the air.
    • Excaliber, a sword that opens up into a gun that shoots lasers shaped like smaller swords.
    • The Boxing Glove, an Extendo Boxing Glove that can charge a deadly KO punch.
    • The Wood Beam, a chunk of wood that extends to smack enemies around
    • And the Knife Shield, an active item which generates a defensive ring of knives that can optionally be launched.
    • Other cursed weapons include the Shellegun (an undead gun that rebuilds itself), the Stone Dome (the head-shaped idol of a vengeful god), and the Unicorn Horn (because someone either killed or de-horned that last unicorn and made a gun out of it).
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Averted. There are only a few melee weapons in the game, and it's actually stated that the Cult of the Gundead consider non-gun weapons heretical. The only melee-oriented hero is a secret character, an exiled Bullet Kin wielding a sword, who is, compared to the rest of his kind, certainly heroic by our standards.
• Hitscan: Most of the guns use slower-than-sound ammunition, but notable exceptions include sniper rifles and the Heck Blaster (basically Earthworm Jim's old laser submachine gun).
• Hub Level: The Breach.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Treasure chests are scattered around the Gungeon, waiting to be opened. They come in various sizes and colors with fancier chests containing better items.
• Infinity -1 Sword:
  • The Fightsabre, an assault rifle made from a laser-sword that will send most incoming projectiles flying right back to sender without lessening the damage they do as long as you keep reloading it. Not only does this feature make it a real lifesaver against most bosses (up to and including the High Dragun), the Fightsabre itself also deals decent amounts of damage, has a good rate of fire, and can fire 500 shots before its ammo supply needs to be replenished. As French Let's Player Bob Lennon demonstrated in the third part of his playthrough, this weapon can turn most of the game into a pure cakewalk as long as you get your timing right. On the downside, it is also considered a cursed item, which means you'll occasionally encounter stronger 'Jammed' enemies after you pick it up, but it is definitely worth it.
  • The good ol' AK-47 also qualifies; no flashy gimmicks or tricks like some other high-rarity weapons, but simply has high damage, good fire rate and accuracy, and a sizeable magazine with a relatively-quick reload. It can reliably take on both rooms of Mooks and bosses both.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • The AKEY47, which you obtain by finishing all of the shortcut elevators. All the joy of the AK47, plus its projectiles double as free keys? Yes, please. It even has a synergy that gives it infinite ammo, because clearly, it wasn't good enough already.
  • The Dragunfire, a weapon unlocked by beating the Dragun for the first time. High damage, good fire rate, decent spread, solid reload, projectiles that both pierce and set enemies on fire. Its super-secret, super-rare upgraded form the High Dragunfire is also great (though sadly not quite as good as the regular version).
  • Also, Gunther, the weapon you unlock by beating the bonus Challenge Mode. He has infinite ammo, mediocre base stats, but gets stronger with every room beaten until he's an unstoppable killing machine.
  • The Elimentaler, which you aquire by defeating the secret boss. High damage, fast fire rate, and can cause chain reactions of dying enemies by turning them into cheese.
  • The Riddle of Lead, which is unlocked when The Lich is defeated. It grants an extra heart container, a passive damage buff, improved dodge rolls, a speed increase, has a chance to negate damage if the player is low on health, and the cherry on top, a full heal when it's picked up. If this item is something you have an opportunity to obtain, you don't have a reason not to.
  • The Lich's Eye Bullets automatically gives every gun its synergy bonus(es), so even your basic D-tier guns are better threefold and your A or S-tier guns are even better. The Gunslinger starts with it and you unlock it by completing a run with him.
  • Once you get it to the maximum level of 60, the Gunderfury will kill most enemies in a few shots from across the screen and deal massive damage to bosses, with its only real downsides being the fact that it's extremely easy to hit the DPS cap with it on rapid fire and that it's easy to run out of ammo with it since each shot takes 2 ammo.
  • The ultimate weapon, the Finished Gun, unlocked by completing all Ammonomicon entries. Again, high damage, incredibly fast fire rate, decent ammo, and the final bullet of every chamber has extra power behind it.
• Instrument of Murder: The Facemelter (a weaponized electric guitar) and the Gunzheng (a weaponized guzheng, a Chinese string instrument).
• Invincible Minor Minion: The Gunreaper, a creature who appears in the later levels and has more than a passing resemblance to The Grim Reaper, cannot be killed by normal means. Instead, it will vanish once the rest of the enemies in the room have been dispatched.
  • The previously mentioned Lord of the Jammed, a Head Swapped Gunreaper that shows up once your curse reaches 10, is also this. Except it'll pursue you for the entire run until you drop your curse below 10.
• Invulnerable Civilians: All NPCs are protected by a force field that diverts bullets if you try to shoot them. Their reactions can range from appalled to mocking.
• Interface Spoiler: A read through the achievements can spoil several otherwise-hidden things about the game, such as the existence of the Secret Levels, the Sixth Chamber, the Lich, the Bullet, and the Pit Lord's Amulet.
• Joke Weapon:
  • The Microtransaction Gun. The gag on this one is a giant Take That! at Microtransactions and publisher companies forcing developers to include DLC (well, despite the fact that the gun itself is also DLC). The gun is classified as an A-tier weapon, so it diminishes your chances at finding actually good guns, costs 100 credits to unlock, costs money to shoot, is rather weak for a weapon of its rank, and a synergy provides a url to the Devolver Digital merch store for its item pickup text. The only upside it has is that its shots can randomly unlock chests, but it would probably be better to buy a key with the money you would have spent shooting (and potentially breaking) the chest.
  • Even worse in this regard is the Klobbe, a reference to the infamous Klobb from GoldenEye (1997), sharing the same horrible inaccuracy and pitiful damage. Its Ammonomicon entry implies it's the worst weapon in the Gungeon, and until an update changed it, it had a unique synergy with the AU gun that makes its inaccuracy even worse!
  • There are several "worse than D tier" weapons you can be challenged to complete a room with, including a nail gun and a literal "Pea Shooter".
  • The JK-47, a wet noodle of a gun that looks like a regular AK-47… until you pick it up and the barrel droops down. It's not as powerful and fires much more slowly than the regular AK, with the only unique point being that reloading it causes nearby enemies to briefly back up in disgust. That being said, if you have the JK-47 and manage to find the actual AK-47 (or vice-versa), you get to dual-wield them for additional firepower; considering that the real AK is already Boring, but Practical by itself, it's every bit as powerful as it sounds.
• Killer Rabbit: Those cute, smiling Blobulons? They're part of a galaxy-spanning empire that's conquered countless planets and obsessed with battle and war. Blobulords, the largest ones, are stated to consume stars.
• Kill Sat: The Mourning Star lets you take control of one.
• King Mook:
  • The Bullet King is obviously this to the Bullet Kin.
  • The Beholster is this to the Beadies. The former even spawns the latter during the former's boss fight.
  • The boss of the first secret level, Blobulord, is this to Blobulons.
  • The Lich, particularly his third phase, is this to the Revolvenants. The latter's Ammonomicon entry foreshadows this by mentioning how they're on their way to "Lichdom". Granted, he is their leader.
• Laser Blade: Played for Laughs with the Fightsabre, a laser gun. That is, it is a laser blade hilt that doubly functions as the grip of a gun formed out of hard light.
• Lead the Target: For the most part, enemies will shoot at where you're currently standing, but a few enemies will aim where they believe you'll strafe to. On their own, this makes them only moderately more dangerous, but especially on later levels where you'll have a lot of bullets coming at once, it might make using a blank the only way to avoid damage.
• Lethal Joke Weapon:
  • The soaker gun can seem useless at first, as it barely deals any direct damage to enemies, only pushing them back. However, this can be considerably more efficient in environments rich in traps and pits, being able to keep space between you and your enemies can be tremendously helpful, and it does deal direct damage to bosses, all without needing to reload since it doesn't use a clip. Furthermore, if you're playing as The Robot, you can fill the whole room with water, which, combined with his starting passive means you'll be able to fry every non-flying enemy in the room with electrified water at the same time without ever having to expose yourself to danger.
  • The Grasschopper, a pistol with a 12-pixel sprite retains the lethal joke status that the gun it's referencing had; It has a one-bullet magazine and limited ammo, but each shot is very powerful and blanks nearby bullets on impact.
  • The Camera is just that — a big ol' journalist's camera with a massive flash bulb on top. It doesn't shoot actual bullets, has a tiny "magazine" of four flashes, and has to charge up before each shot... but it hits every enemy in the entire room simultaneously and is almost unparalleled in how quickly it can clear a massive room filled with weak enemies. Better yet, if you find the right upgrade items, that last part becomes "a massive room filled with any enemies".
  • The Klobbe, an SMG made for reference to GoldenEye (1997). Like the game it hails from, it has a mediocre fire rate and a pitiful spread and damage per bullet. The hidden synergy from using it with the Cog of Battle, however, actually turns it into a viable if-not good gun by ramping up the damage it deals.
  • Ser Junkan has a chance to spawn instead of junk from destroying chests; at his starting level, he can't even hurt enemies and just weakly pushes them around. Collect MORE junk, however, and he'll eventually become a Hyper-Competent Sidekick.
  • Casey is a baseball bat which, like all melee weapons, the Gungeon rejects and curses you for having it. It's a slow-to-charge melee weapon with awkward hitboxes and is classed as a D rank item, meaning it doesn't even sell for much. It also does 100 damage on a fully charged swing, has a surprisingly-wide arc, can bat projectiles back at enemies, can bat other enemies at enemies, and has the potential to break the difficulty wide open in the right hands.
  • Some guns have Punny Names, and seem at least a little useless at first glance.
    • The Barrel is a gun that shoots live fish. Seems silly until you realize the fish actually do decent damage for its fire rate, plus has a chance to stun enemies, allowing you to deal more damage with impunity. It's also one of several weapons that can open the Chamber 1 fireplace if both your water barrels got destroyed. Additionally, the fish leave puddles of water where they hit, so if you also happen to have an electrical weapon or are playing as The Robot...
    • The Gungine, a pun on the name of the game. Has high fire rate, decent damage for each bullet, and can gain ammo by moving over liquids. Considering how many enemies create liquid, or how much of it can be created from barrels, this weapon has theoretically infinite ammo — becoming actually infinite if you use items like the Bug Boots, which passively generate liquids where the player walks.
    • There's also the Wood Beam, which is a plank that extends outwards like a laser beam when "shot". It's one of the silliest weapons in the game, but also capable of amazing damage output if you swing the beam to hit enemies.
  • The Quad Laser, which has the slowest projectile speed in the game, but one-shots enemies and tears bosses' health apart when it finally makes contact. When the flavor text states that it cannot be halted, they mean it.
  • The Pea Shooter, which doubles as a great example of Magikarp Power. Alone, it's exactly as strong as you'd expect a pistol that shoots peas to be (which is not-at-all). However, its Pea Cannon synergy substantially increases the damage and size of the projectiles, on top of making them explode; up to eight other items can trigger this synergy, more than almost any other. Additionally, one of those items, Broccoli, will also activate a second synergy, Vegetables, which triples the weapon's damage and makes every shot both bounce off walls and pierce through enemies. Just try not to think "who's laughing now?" as you barrage the gundead with giant green cannon balls of doom from a D-tier pistol. With 1000 rounds of reserve ammo.
• Limit Break: Many of the active items recharge based on damage output, effectively making them this.
• Literal Metaphor:
  • The first gun you receive in the tutorial is the Pea Shooter, a gun that shoots literal peas.
  • The Barrel is a barrel-shaped gun that shoots fish, in reference to the old saying "as easy as shooting fish in a barrel". According to the description, a gun-related phrase repeated enough can have strange effects coupled with the fact that "words are the Gungeon's second language".
• Luck-Based Mission: A NPC you'll rescue in the Gungeon, the Sorceress, will provide a "blessing" for the price of 6 Hegemony credits. This "blessing" means that a) your gun will randomly change into any other unlocked gun during the next run and b) you won't be able to pick up any guns. Which means you can get either totally overpowered weapons at any given time, or you can be stuck in a difficult room or boss fight with only a Joke Weapon. Completing a "blessed" run will unlock Gunther, one of the best weapons in the game.
  • Gatling Gull can be seen as a Luck-Based Boss. Depending on which variant of room you get, his difficulty varies wildly — in the room with no cover other than some breakable bushes, he becomes a nightmare clad in feathers. If you get the room with the four pillars, he is pretty much a free Master Round.
• Luck Stat:
  • Coolness will increase the chance of finding rewards after clearing a room and decrease the chance of finding a chest with a fuse. You aren't directly told how much coolness you have at any given point nor what items increase it, but items that increase coolness will generally use the word "cool" in their Ammonomicon description.
  • Curse works in the opposite way — increasing the chance of finding Mimic chests and decreasing the chance of finding rewards after clearing a room. It's not entirely a downgrade, though; enemies drop more money, and your chances of finding ammo after clearing rooms increase.
• Macrogame:
  • Defeating bosses earns you Hegemony Credits which carry over multiple runs and can be used to unlock new weapons and items to find within the Gungeon.
  • Rescuing people locked in the Gungeon saves them forever and lets them show up in the Breach or during runs to provide their services. There are also secret playable characters who you can unlock.
  • Contributing to the repair of elevators (which allow you to start a run at later floors) is a quest that can be accomplished over several, even unsuccessful, playthroughs.
• Magikarp Power:
  • Ser Junkan, hands down. First, you have to be lucky enough to get him (which is REALLY hard after you "unlock" him as a standard chest drop, the spawn rate drops to 1%) instead of a regular piece of junk from a broken chest. Then, you have to destroy further chests to get even more junk to increase his level, which means that all your usual drops from treasure chests are replaced with otherwise useless junk, or a random supply like health bullets, or even an exploded chest containing nothing. You can get free junk from the Ser Junkan shrine if you have him, but good luck finding it. You need 6 pieces of junk to unlock Ser Junkan's archangel form, which makes him extremely powerful AND will sacrifice his life to fully heal you if you die, and if you get one more piece of junk, he loses his healing ability, but it becomes quite clear who the real star of the playthrough is. Oh, and if you luck out and get the rare Gold Junk (a solid gold sculpture of trash that also nets you a whole bunch of money when obtained) to spawn instead of regular junk, Junkan gets a Mini-Mecha instead of his regular evolution.
  • Also, on a game-spanning meta level, the Finished Gun. You unlock this weapon once all other Ammonomicon entries have been filled out, and its base stats are incredibly, incredibly powerful, its only downside really being the curse it gives when used. It factors into this trope because once unlocked, it replaces the Unfinished Gun whenever it's found, and the latter is a rather poor weapon to obtain.
  • The Pea Shooter, as detailed under Lethal Joke Weapon. An ordinarily crappy D-tier pistol that can turn into a powerful cannon with the right synergy, which itself has several activation items.
  • The Chamber Gun starts as a regular semi-automatic in the first floor. On later floors it transforms into a shotgun, a rocket launcher and a homing lava beam weapon. On the last floor, it becomes into an unholy terror that can obliterate a screenful of enemies in a second.
  • The Triple Gun is an oddity: while it does get stronger the more it is used (cycling through the forms of Vash's signature weapons), the form it takes actually depends on remaining ammo count, meaning that picking up an ammo box might just fling it back from massive Wave-Motion Gun to mediocre revolver.
• Metal Slime: The Supply Drop update introduced Keybullet Kin, which taunt the player and run to the other side of the screen to teleport. Chasing them down is dangerous in a bullet-filled environment, but they have low HP and always drop a key on death. Advanced Gungeons and Draguns introduced their cousins, the Chance Kin, which drop random pickups instead.
• Mix-and-Match Weapon:
  • Despite their name, the "Gun Nut" enemies wield these.
  • The Huntsman, a shotgun/axe combo that is reloaded by swinging it, which can destroy bullets if timed well.
  • Excaliber, a burst-firing sword that also can deflect bullets.
  • The Staff of Firepower, which is a revolver taped together with a magic wand.
  • The Duct Tape active item allows you to create your own Mix-and-Match Weapon out of any two weapons you may have in your inventory.
• Motifs: Guns and ammo, naturally. Nearly everything is related to or named after them in some manner.
• More Dakka: Too many weapons to list here. And this being the kind of game it is, you can expect this to be the standard MO for pretty much all bosses.
• My Greatest Failure: The main plot of Enter the Gungeon revolves around a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits coming to the Gungeon, each one having their own greatest failure, which they plan to undo using the Gun That Can Kill the Past hidden within it.
  • The Marine: Having abandoned his unit to Eldritch Abomination after an experiment gone wrong. The Gungeon allows him to go back there and save his squad from the monster.
  • The Convict: Getting sold out by her "business partner", Black Stache. The Gungeon gives her the chance to properly fight him off and escape arrest when he and Hegemony troops stormed her nightclub to apprehend her.
  • The Pilot: Having to accept his colleague's Heroic Sacrifice to allow him to escape from the Hegemony starship that caught them conducting an illegal salvage operation. The Gungeon gives him the chance, and new skills, to destroy the starship, saving them both.
  • The Hunter: Having been forced to surrender to her nemesis, Dr. Wolfclaw, rather than fighting back. The Gungeon lets her bring a Blank back in time with her, preventing him from capturing her, and instead letting her defeat him and his robot-monster.
  • The Cultist: Being considered a mere sidekick to their partner, thus receiving an All of the Other Reindeer treatment from the NPCs. The Gungeon lets them kill their own partner in a Mirror Match, thus assuming the mantle of protagonist.
  • The Robot: Having somehow failed to kill the Last Human, which put EMP-R0R's army at a major disadvantage against humanity. The Gungeon allows it to undo this error, successfully slaying the Last Human in an arena.
  • The Bullet: Having been defeated by Cannon and/or Agunim. The Gungeon allows them to go back in time and defeat both.
  • The Gunslinger: Creating the Gungeon to begin with, and becoming The Lich. Due to being brought to the present Gungeon by a paradox, it allows him to kill his future self, thus ensuring the Gungeon will never come to be.
• Nail 'Em: One of the weapons you may find in the Gungeon is a good ol' nailgun. It has a big ammo capacity, doesn't need to reload and can be fired almost as fast as you press the button. Unfortunately, its damage is pitiful, so it's more a Joke Weapon than something useful on its own, though with the right upgrade items (or a better gun plus a roll of Duct Tape), it becomes quite lethal.
• Nerf Arm: The game is practically built on this. While there are plenty of normal, real-life guns, there are even more silly weapons that are just as if not more effective. Highlights include:
  • The Silencer, a pillow that shoots zippers and can be used to smack enemies. This one's Ammonomicon entry reveals that one of the Gungeon's previous residents was a mad wizard that kept enchanting random stuff into makeshift guns, which explains a lot of later entries.
  • The Origuni, a gun made of paper which fires curving paper airplanes.
  • The Crown of Guns, a crown with a bunch of guns strapped to it that wildly sprays semi-homing bullets in all directions.
  • The Balloon Gun, which fires miniature tornadoes and allows you to hover, but can be popped if you take damage.
  • The Starpew, a watering can that fires surprisingly lethal drops of water.
  • The Anvillain, a crate that fires anvils.
  • The Super Meat Gun, a slab of meat that fires bouncing saw blades.
  • The Fossilized Gun, a dinosaur skull that sprays oil and breathes fire.
  • The Light Gun, an NES zapper that fires lasers and a homing duck.
  • The Shock Rifle, a giant AA battery that fires bolts of electricity.
  • The Gunzheng, a Chinese string instrument that fires arrows with machine gun-like speed.
  • The Face Melter, an electric guitar that comes with weaponized amplifiers and shoots deadly musical notes.
  • The Barrel, which shoots fish.
  • The Mailbox, which shoots letters and a "suspicious package" (which might be explosive, poisonous, or just a glitter bomb).
  • The Lower Case r, which is exactly what it sounds like. It shoots letters that spell the word "BULLET".
  • Finally, the Dart Gun, a literal Nerf gun (specifically, a purple-colored expy of the Nerf Maverick revolver).
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: The Gungeon and Cult of the Gundead call this heresy, to a point that carrying melee weapons increases your curse. The Bullet's starting sword is even called Blasphemy^note which ironically doesn't increase your curse, likely because it's a starting weapon, in case the point wasn't obvious enough.
• Nintendo Hard: Aside from your first weapon and a few exceedingly-rare examples, all weapons have limited ammo, enemies become both tankier and more accurate the further you go, and new enemies start showing up with patterns that can reasonably be called Bullet Hell. The later bosses in particular can have screen-filling attacks that you need to look for pixels to dodge accurately. And this isn't counting each character's unique final boss, and the True Final Boss. Good luck.
• No Body Left Behind: Enemy corpses disappear after a brief while and can be blown up with the Melted Rock, but Jammed enemies dissolve into dust immediately upon dying.
• Not Completely Useless:
  • The Junk you get from breaking chests is completely useless... Unless you have the Trashcannon, which synergizes with it to increase damage by 25% once (despite its description stating it increases damage with each Junk), or you encounter the Sell Creep who'll gladly buy it, or if you're playing the Robot, which gets a 5% damage buff for each Junk in its inventory. It also becomes vital if you have picked up Ser Junkan as an ally, as each Junk collected powers him up. Also, if you find a Ser Junkan shrine, you can offer it Junk in exchange for Armor.
  • The Busted Television's only real use is for you to take it to the Blacksmith which unlocks The Robot, as it's otherwise a huge liability as you can only throw it, after which it just sits on the floor and doesn't affect anything, and it drops on the floor when you dodge roll, so you must toss it across pits first. However, after you throw it, the game considers the item active for a couple seconds. Now, there's another item that shoots a ring of bullets whenever you use an active item…
• Nuclear Weapons Taboo: Miniature nukes can be called down with the Big Boy active item, creating giant explosions at the crosshair and leaving behind large pools of poisonous waste. The Big Boy is also a cursed item, a quality usually reserved for melee weapons and "forbidden" magics. According to the item's Ammonomicon entry, the "Third Interstellar Armistice" forbids the use of nuclear weapons in the Enter the Gungeon universe, but because the Gungeon apparently existed before the armistice was made, it's something of a "grey area".
• Oculothorax: The Beholster boss is a shout-out to the Beholder of Dungeons & Dragons fame. In addition to the traditional eye-beams, each of its tentacles carries a different gun.
• Odd Job Gods: Kaliber, the goddess of guns, is implied to be one of the driving forces behind the events of the story. Strangely enough, she isn't seen that much apart from some mentions in the Ammonomicon and her appearance in the final phase of the Kill Pillars battle as a statue.
• One-Hit Kill: Some of the magic-themed weapons (e.g. Bundle of Wands, Hexagun, Witch Pistol) come with a chance to transmogrify enemies into harmless chickens. This won't work on bosses, of course, but is quite effective at quickly dispatching dangerous Demonic Spiders and Giant Mooks.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The player characters are all known simply by their titles. The Convict was once known as "Laser Lily" back when she was a crime boss, though that too is likely just a nickname.
• Our Liches Are Different: They're The Gunslinger for one, and practice Ammomancy. They can become giant, and form limbs out of bullets.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Spent are zombie bullets. It Makes Sense in Context.
• Pathetic Drooping Weapon: The JK-47 gun's barrel droops loosely when you first pick it up and every time you re-equip it. This is to signify that it's an objectively worse knockoff of the much stronger AK-47.
• Pocket Rocket Launcher:
  • A common passive item is the "Rocket-Propelled Bullet", which increases the projectile velocity of non-hitscan weaponry. It stacks with all other such bullet upgrades, but does not explode by itself (only if you also have Explosive Bullets or Flak Bullets items as well).
  • The Yari Launcher is a weapon that resembles a shotgun, and burst-fires homing missiles.
  • The Jetpack active item and Backpack passive item combine to allow the player to launch a rocket when activating the jetpack.
  • The Zorgun fires a random explosive when its magazine is emptied, including a rocket-propelled grenade. The Alien Engine allows it to fire three such projectiles as its clip empties, and the Shadow Bullet's bonus projectiles will always be one of these special rounds.
• Power at a Price: Cursed items. They tend to be better than most other items of their kind, but having cursed items will give you bad luck — it decreases the chance of finding items after clearing rooms, increases the chance of finding mimics, and causes enemies to spawn as their Jammed variants occasionally.
• The Power of Hate: Invoked with the Shotgun Full Of Hate, which has a counterpart...
• The Power of Love: ...Appropiately named Shotgun Full Of Love.
• The Power of Rock: The Face Melter is an electric guitar that fires musical notes in a cross pattern. Reloading it summons an amplifier for double the firepower!
• Planet of Hats: Everything that manifests or lives in the Gungeon is dedicated to using, making or worshipping firearms. The Clown Mask suggests a similar event to the Gungeon's creation has happened to several banks, creating money-themed "Mungeons".
• Player Death Is Dramatic: If your gungeoneer dies, the entire Gungeon's color is drained and they fall to their knees in pain (or if you're playing as the cultist, they collapse to the ground outright). The Gungeon's clock then rewinds time to the moment that the run was started, and a gunshot is heard as the gungeoneer finally falls to the ground and dies (or if playing as the cultist, their body fades away).
• Player Tic: One player hobby will be to run into the clutter in the dungeon, even after the room is clear. Things like books and clay pots won't actually do anything — they block one bullet during combat, but they're often positioned on the walls so they won't even be good cover — but players may feel the need to walk over or shoot them anyway just to watch them break. Or flip a table that has items on it just to watch them fly off.
  • On occasion, there is a very, very small chance that one of the random breakable containers will contain a single coin, but it happens so rarely that there really is no point in actively breaking all the knick-knacks in the room aside from Catharsis Factor.
  • There's also a small chance pots that will contain a fairy… that will aggressively attack the player.
  • This is actually invoked at one point. Try pushing a table down a pit. You get a table flip tech that can spawn in the Gungeon for it. And the Steam achievement for doing that is titled "I knew someone would do that".
• Poison Is Corrosive: The green puddles of "poison" deal continuous damage to players who stand in them for more than a second, and grant a Damage Over Time effect to enemies. Lampshaded with the description of the Poison Vial item: "For external use only." However, it's also hinted that "poison" is actually radioactive material, which would indeed poison though mere exposure: The Gamma Ray gun poisons its targets, the Big Boy's bombs leave behind puddles of it, and it has no effect on mutant enemies.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The description for the Charming Rounds (which give each shot a chance to temporarily turn its victim against its peers) says "Each round is forged then quenched in the tears of young and unnoticed Bullet Kin."
• Practical Currency: Shells. As in spent cartridge casings, not shotgun shells, though the Gungeon has plenty of those too.
• Press X to Die: Some items like Cigarettes or the Lament Configurum will hurt the player upon use, and yet despite this, it's possible to use them even when on Death's welcome mat.
• Purposely Overpowered: The Makeshift Cannon, a weapon powerful enough to kill bosses in one shot. The catch? Its maximum ammo count is just one single shell, so you might want to save it for a particularly powerful boss.
  • The Gunslinger. His starting gun alone is better than half the C-tier guns and his starting item is The Lich's Eye Bullets, which gives synergy bonus to all of your guns. Unlocking him is a hassle, though, which requires beating Bullet Hell with the Paradox, and then beating the Gunslinger's past in the run that immediately follows the Paradox in order for him to be playable from the start, meaning that if you die as the Gunslinger, you need to start the entire process all over again and beat Bullet Hell as the Paradox for another try, plus he requires seven Hegemony Credits to start a run as.
• Random Effect Spell: The Chancebulon, a d20-shaped Blobulon that fires projectiles that emulate the other varieties of Blobulon. Its strongest attack shoots terrain-altering bullets in all directions that bounce off of walls; its weakest just results in its own death.
• Random Loot Exchanger: You can sometimes find green boxes called munchers which you can give two guns to, after which it spits out a random other gun with a quality either between the original two or one tier above the best. There is also a red variant called the evil muncher which always spawns in the secret room of Bullet Hell and exclusively takes the first ten guns you put in before unlocking Gunslinger's Ashes and switching to taking a random amount of guns before giving one with a 75% chance of being A and a 25% chance of being S. Guns put in the Evil Muncher carry over between runs.
• Really 700 Years Old: The Hunter, due to being cryogenically frozen. Her past boss fight takes place 1000 and some odd years ago.
• Real-Time Weapon Change: You can change your weapon using the mouse wheel on PC or by pressing a face button on console versions. However, given the Bullet Hell nature of the game, you can dramatically slow down time while changing weapons by holding the Left Control key (or holding the same face button) if you need a moment to assess the situation.
• Reference Overdosed: Almost every weapon or item is or contains a reference to something. Just take a look at this game's Shout-Out page.
• Renovating the Player Headquarters: The game features a hub that slowly gains new inhabitants as you make your runs through the titular Gungeon and rescue them. Some of them open up shop, granting you new items to find within your runs, while others open up shortcuts to the Chambers you've accessed before. Others yet, added in the A Farewell to Arms update, give you special modifiers and game modes to tack onto your next run.
• Required Secondary Powers: Most weapons or items that create puddles of "poison" also grant the player immunity to it. Be very careful when using one of the ones that don't, like the Plunger.
• Resourceful Rodent: The aptly-named Resourceful Rat is an anthropomorphic giant rat that managed to adapt himself to the life in the Gungeon. He uses the ever-changing layout of the Gungeon to construct a giant maze to serve as his lair, he hoards a lot of Gungeon's treasures, and he has great expertise in scavenging and stealing stuff left by Gungeoneers, and even managed to construct a mecha out of scavenged stuff. It's stated that his resourcefulness would've let him reach The Gun That Can Kill The Past with ease, and the reason he didn't do so is that he's more interested in frustrating the Gungeoneers.
• Retirony: One item is a Badge belonging to "someone near retirement", who spawns a buddy cop that helps you take out enemies and can be interacted with. He can take damage and may die, asking you to take care of his daughter and all.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Most of the pistols you can find in-game seem to be revolvers.
• Rewatch Bonus: After seeing the True Final Boss, one might notice how the gunslinger in the title screen looks identical to him, and might even be him. Naturally, this turns out to be right, and you can even unlock his pre-corruption self as a playable character.
• Robot Buddy: The Robot, an unlockable player character. An adorable bot whose overall design is evocative of big, bulky CRT monitors and can attack with an arm blaster, or by leaking electrified coolant on enemies. The fact that it's from a race of robots who aim to exterminate humanity is considerably less cute, however, though Robot itself seems happy to cooperate with them in the present day.
• Russian Reversal: The Bullet and the Shell are both oversized ammo that shoot weapons, that then fire more bullets and shells.
• Segmented Serpent: The Ammoconda, one of the bosses of the Gungeon Proper, is a giant snake with multiple segments that each fire individually. It can even eat the turrets that occasionally appear during the fight to add an extra segment to its body, healing itself and increasing its firepower.
• Serious Business: Guns, of course, to an absurd degree (even for something that is fairly serious in Real Life). Every aspect of the setting revolves around guns. The one weapon that is unambiguously in no way a gun is even called "Blasphemy".
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: If you have any weapons or items able to charm enemies (such as the Charmed Bow or the Charm Horn), you can temporarily make enemies fight amongst themselves.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The basic plot of the game is this. All characters have something in their past they want to defeat, so they seek a magic weapon which is capable of doing just that.
• Shaped Like Itself: One of the guns is a lowercase "r" that acts as burst-fire pistol that shoots out BULLETs. As in, literally the word bullet as a six-round burst, while saying "BULLET" in an uninterested tone. It also produces written sound effects as it hits surfaces or enemies. Different Synergies can change the spoken word(s) on top of increasing the weapon's damage. Perhaps the most notable one is "Just in Case", which transforms it into a capitalized R and makes it a single-shot rocket launcher instead; the rocket, is, of course, shaped like the word "ROCKET", and has the narrator exclaim "Rocket!" each time you pull the trigger.
• Shoot Out the Lock: More like "shoot the thing the lock is placed on"; players can opt to shoot a chest instead of using a key to open it. This reduces the quality of the potential loot. You'll be lucky to get some health or a key for it; for low-quality chests, the result is generally junk, a nearly useless passive effect reminding you "next time use a key".^note The only uses of junk are to boost the damage of a single gun, the Trashcannon, and to empower Ser Junkan, a companion. The Robot gets an additive 5% damage buff for each Junk it carries.
  • The AKEY-47 gun takes the trope a step further: Shooting locks with it will actually unlock them instead of breaking them, saving you on keys. The Microtransaction Gun can also produce this effect, albeit rarely.
• Shoplift and Die: The shopkeeper does not tolerate guns being shot in the shop. The first time, you get a warning. The second time, he'll take out his shotgun and double the prices. Shoot again, and he'll start drowning the store in bullets and close the store in other floors. At this point, if you're daring, you can steal items from him, which is the only readily-available way to get the Payday themed items, which cost 9,999 coins; far, far more than you can ever get in any run. They also won't begin appearing normally (or being sold at an affordable price) until you steal them at least once each, so yeah. Steal them.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Silver Has Mystic Powers: The Silver Bullets passive item lets the player deal triple damage against Jammed foes.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Many guns are simply just... guns which fire bullets. Some of the higher-tier guns are just guns which fire bullets that do a lot of damage, fire rapidly, and are more accurate than the rest. They lack gimmicks, sure, but they're very potent.
  • Invoked with the Old Goldie, a powerful shotgun without any particular gimmick that will one-shot most enemies in the early game and melt bosses' health, reloads and fires relatively quickly, and has a lot of ammo for how powerful it is; its only special effect is passively increasing all damage the wielder deals while held. Its description drives the point home:
    "The right answer isn't always a gun that shoots bees, a water gun, or a flaming hand. Sometimes, all you need is a simple concept executed immaculately. This gold trimmed, double-barreled shotgun represents the best of traditional guncraft. "
• Situational Sword: The Sprun is a passive item in form of a green orb familiar that otherwise does nothing but follow you around, but when you fulfill a specific random condition, it transforms into an extremely powerful Windgunner weapon with rapid fire, infinite ammo and a huge clip you probably won't realistically empty out without firing it constantly, but the weapon only lasts for around 30 seconds and to use it again, you need to fulfill the condition again: they range from something as common and easily controllable as flipping a table to something as inconvenient as being reduced to half a heart or losing all your blanks or ammo
• Smart Bomb: Blanks clear all bullets on the screen, knock back enemies, and momentarily prevents most bosses from attacking, giving you a brief respite from the chaos.
• Smoking Is Cool: Literally — using the "Cigarettes" as an active item will permanently increase your coolness by one, although it damages the player for half a heart (or one armor) when used.
• Spikes of Doom: Spikes can be seen at the bottom of several pits.
• Spread Shot: Several weapons fire these out. As for the enemies, it's easier to list those who don't fire some form of this.
  • The Scattershot passive item makes every weapon do this, with every individual projectile dealing a little less damage, but doing more total if they all hit.
• Stable Time Loop: The Gungeon became the firearm-themed labyrinth it is today after a mysterious force from on high plowed into it in the form of a giant bullet. A bullet you may have fired, depending on how the ending is to be interpreted.
• Stat Overflow: Armor will appear at the end of your health bar and will depleted cause a blank effect upon getting depleted.
• Status Effects:
  • On fire: Continuous Damage Over Time. Players can literally stop, drop, and roll to put themselves out; enemies have to hope it wears off. Some weapon Synergies let the player fire more powerful green fire that never goes out on enemies.
  • Poisoned: Also continuous damage over time for enemies; for players, the effect only lasts for as long as they remain standing in poison and doesn't kick in at all if they dodge roll out of it fast enough.
  • Stunned: Only applies to enemies, which stand motionless and defenseless for a few seconds.
  • Frozen: Same as above, plus low-health Mooks can be instantly killed by being rolled into. For bosses, it only slows them down.
• Stationary Boss: The Wallmonger, The High Dragun, HS Absolution, and The Lich's second phase do not move around like the other bosses do, but they make up for this by using more complex Bullet Hell patterns and limiting the amount of room the player has to dodge (well, technically, the Wallmonger does move, but since the screen moves with it, it doesn't do much in effect besides give the fight a time limit).
• Suffer the Slings: Yep, you can also get a Sling. Despite being considered a low quality weapon, its rocks deal +150% damage to bosses and +100% damage if it ricochets off a wall before striking the target, which can stack; together, they make the Sling very lethal against bosses, but fairly weak against normal rank-and-file gundead.
• Super Prototype: Zig-zagged. The RUBE-ADYNE Prototype is noticeably less powerful than the RUBE-ADYNE MK.II with its description even hammering the point home, while the Prototype Railgun, while lacking the refined Railgun's room-clearing super-ricochet properties, deals triple the normal Railgun's already-high damage, making which is better less clear. The Teleporter Prototype averts it more than not, being an active item that sends you to a random room upon use, and whose description calls it "unpredictable".
• Suspend Save: At the end of every floor, there's a talking red button you can interact with who will offer the option to save your game and quit. When you reload the save, you'll start on the next floor. This also works for most of the secret floors' entrances, though not all of them.
• Suspiciously Cracked Wall: Cracked walls can be shot to reveal secret passages leading to secret rooms.
• Swiss-Army Weapon: A few guns alternate between two modes with each reload, allowing for a more dynamic experience and, in some cases, some sweet combos. Examples include the Trick Gun, a revolver that turns into a shotgun and back again, and the Gungeon Ant, a literal giant ant that alternates between shooting oil (that creates puddles in the battlefield) and fireballs (to light said puddle with).
• Take That!:
  • The Microtransaction Gun is one to DLC and Executive Meddling, specifically the developers' experience making the mobile Dungeon Keeper at Electronic Arts. It's a gun that shoots dolls of the Gungeoneers and other Gungeon-related merch at the cost of one casing per shot instead of ammo. While relatively powerful, using it at all really isn't worth it, and there are many guns that do an equally good job of killing stuff without taking away your precious money. In addition, it's the second-most expensive gun in Ox and Cadence's shop at 100 credits (the most expensive being 200 credits and the next most expensive being 30), unless you buy the actual DLC in the form of the Enter the Gungeon Collector's Edition, which includes the gun with it. The gun's Ammonomicon entry drives the point home further:
  Everyone involved in the production of this gun thought it was a bad idea, but the higher-ups made them build it anyway.
  Later, management shut down that gun factory for making a gun no one liked.
  • The Beastmode option is one at the Bragging Rights Rewards games give you for replaying the game at a harder difficulty. Beating the High Dragun with it on unlocks the Bait Launcher, a gun that launches steaks that summon tigers to maul enemies. The reason it's a Take That! is because, besides the initial unlock condition, having Beastmode on does not change the gameplay whatsoever; either you have it on, or you don't, and that's the extent of it.
• Taking the Bullet: How the Pig familiar translates into a 1-Up. The Ammonomicon will even update itself once you're revived by it by hailing the Pig as a hero.
• Title Confusion: In case you were wondering, the game is about a dungeon filled with guns, not gunge.
• Title Drop: By one of the guards in front of the Keep's main door.
• True Final Boss: The Lich, a boss who appears in the sixth chamber. You can only unlock his floor by beating each of the characters' Final Bosses, which in turn requires you to complete the Bullet Fetch Quest and kill the High Dragun.
• Trick Shot Puzzle: Winchester's minigames, which feature a room full of colored blocks suspended over a pit and allows the player to use only the trick gun. They can be cheesed by players with the jetpack or wings who can just fly over the gap and shoot the targets at point blank.
• Two Shots from Behind the Bar: The shopkeeper is usually a very cordial fellow, selling you weapons and supplies you'll need to find the gun that can kill the past, and giving you various tips. Make him angry by shooting in his store however...
• Underground Level: While all of the chambers of the Gungeon are this by virtue of being underneath the Breach, Chamber 3, the Black Power Mine fits this trope asthetically the most. It even has minecarts for you and Bullet Kin to ride.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Actually, it's very necessary, to the point that some bullet patterns are unavoidable without it. It's a key game mechanic; the player is invincible for the first half of their dodge roll, and can even use it to jump across gaps.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The third phase of the Resourceful Rat boss fight (introduced in Advanced Gungeons and Draguns) is a round of Punch-Out!! of all things.
• Unexpected Shmup Level: The Pilot's Past Boss turns the game into a classic Shoot 'Em Up where he must go against a battlecruiser with his ship.
• Unique Enemy:
  • The Arrowkin, a primitive form of the Bullet Kin who only appear when the "Devolve" effect successfully procs on a normal enemy.
  • Tombstoners are Bullet Kin-like enemies whose Magnums shoot a string of six bullets, shaped like a cross, at you. The Lich will occasionally spawn them during his fight, and they'll rarely spawn in Bullet Hell or R&G Department, but otherwise, you don't really see them.
  • Speaking of R&G Department, the entire floor is nothing BUT unique enemies. All of them look ridiculous even by this game's standards, are highly varied, have set layouts that don't change on revisits, don't have Ammonomicon entries, and, of course, don't appear anywhere else in the game. The only "normal" enemies that can appear on this floor are Confirmed, and the above-mentioned Tombstoners, and both are exceedingly rare.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: While nearly every gun visibly held by an enemy can be obtained at some point due to either being high-tier boss unlockables or lower-tier mundane weapons, the key exceptions are the Gunreaper's scythe, the Gun Nut's sword, the Chain Gunner's flail, the Giant Bullet Kin's revolver, and the Gunmmy's mummified VertebraeK-47
• Variable Mix: The music becomes more idle when you haven't encountered any enemies in a while, then kicks back in when you get back in a fight. It will also sometimes jump to a different segment when you move between rooms, just to keep things varied.
• Versus Character Splash: One is shown each time you're about to fight a boss, with your character on one side and the boss on the other.
• Vestigial Empire: The Blobulons were once part of an empire that spanned a thousand worlds, until an unfortunate winter campaign.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: This actually must be invoked for the Ledge Goblin's sidequest, where you have to keep pushing her helmet into the depths of the Gungeon for her to retrieve over multiple runs. A rare case of negative Character Development, as she is grateful to you at the first rescue but antagonistic to you by the fourth rescue, but if you want that Blast Helmet, you'll have to be a jackass to her.
  • You also have a couple opportunities to invoke this after certain boss fights. Killing the Bullet King/Old King's chancellor while he's sobbing over the loss of his liege (and/or destroying the throne made of guns), murdering the orphaned spawns of the Beholster, destroying the Gorgun's petrified corpse, and finishing off Blobulord when he's shrunken down to the size of a loaf of bread are noteworthy examples, although players might do some of these for the potential coin bonuses.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: All three of the bosses you can randomly face in the Keep of the Lead Lord (Bullet King, Gatling Gull and the Trigger Twins) are much less of a pushover than Manuel (who teaches you the game's basic gameplay maneuvers and thus doesn't fight very hard), having much denser bullet patterns to dodge.
• Weaponized Offspring: The gimmick of the Scrambler, a gun that shoots "bullet eggs" that hatch into swarms of homing bullets. Probably one of the best low rank guns, thanks to disproportionately high damage and excellent tracking effectively meaning you don't even need to aim ever again.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: On rare occasions starting from the Supply Drop Update, the Teleporter Prototype can take you to a room containing a giant eyeball in the center, silently staring at you. Neither the later post-launch updates or Exit the Gungeon have yet explained what exactly the eyeball is or where it came from.
• Whale Egg: The Scrambler fires unhatched bullet eggs. The bird-like Gigi enemy can spit them up as well.
• Wham Shot: Once you reach the True Final Boss, the first thing you'll immediately notice is how the boss is wearing both a hat and a cloak, revealing the significance of the silhouette in the title screen.
  • A related example; beat the True Final Boss with the Paradox and you are immediately thrown into a new run as a completely new Gungeoneer… with a hat and cloak. Then it happens again when you make it to the True Final Boss and see that there are TWO OF THEM this time!
• Weird Currency: Empty bullet cartridges are used as currency to buy things in the in-game shop.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: Hegemony credits, specifically.
• Words Can Break My Bones: One of the silliest weapons, the Lowercase r. It doesn't fire bullets; instead, it speaks the word BULLET in bursts of letter-shaped projectiles.
• World of Pun: As if the game title wasn't enough, nearly every boss, enemy, level, and item in the game is a firearm-related pun of some sort. For instance, the Gungeon itself is an ammunition-themed place where those haunted by their past go to toil and suffer for eternity.
  • Another one: after the AG&D update, the loading screens say "Reloading" instead of "Generating".
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: One of the NPCs you'll end up rescuing, the Gunsling King, speaks in this way.

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YOU DIED

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The Past still haunts you