20 Minutes Till Dawn is a survival roguelike developed by flanne. The goal of the game is straightforward — survive twenty minutes. That's easier said than done, however, as you'll have to defend against an endless horde of increasingly threatening Eldritch Abominations who are out for your blood. With only a gun, your wits, and what powers you possess, can you make it to dawn?
A spinoff, 20 Minutes Till Dawn: Emberpath, is currently in production.
The game was released on Steam on June 8, 2023. Android and iOS versions are planned for the future.
20 Minutes Till Dawn provides examples of:
- Action Bomb: One small enemy type explodes on death. If you get too close, they will start beeping, then blow themselves up on their own, but if you shoot them from a safe distance you can exploit them to damage multiple enemies at once. These are very common in the Temple map, where they are joined by larger versions who have so much HP, the only viable way to kill them is to approach them to trigger them, and then run out of their explosion range.
- Action Girl: All the characters are girls who are very capable of shooting eldritch abominations to pieces.
- Animalistic Abomination: Shub-Niggurath takes the form of a horned, quadrupedal abomination in this game, likely as a reference to one of their titles being "The Black Goat of the Woods".
- Anti-Escape Mechanism: When Shub-Niggurath and Shoggoth appear, an electric barrier appears around the area you and the boss are in, forcing you to engage with them for a minute.
- Area of Effect: One of the keys to surviving this game is to flood the screen with blasts or large projectiles that take up a lot of space. Your earliest area of effect is simply to use a grenade launcher, later on you develop skills that can attack the entire screen such as Gaze or Smite.
- Bag of Spilling: Like other survivor shooter games, your character will lose all the skills and abilities they earned from leveling up or getting tomes. However thing that is kept are runes.
- Blow You Away: The Aero Magic tree lets you launch a Gale of wind every two seconds.
- Boring, but Practical: Diamond's claim to fame is 7 HP. Nothing flashy, but when other characters have 3-4 HP, this means she can take more hits during a run.
- Brain Monster: The weakest enemies in the game are floating brains with eyes and tentacles.
- Bullet Hell: There are a number of skills such as shrapnel which can help eventually cover the screen with bullets.
- Charged Attack: The Crossbow can be charged, greatly increasing its damage and piercing.
- Combat Tentacles: Hastur's ability allows her to summon tentacles to attack the hordes of enemies.
- Contractual Boss Immunity: Bosses are affected less by some upgrades; they only stay frozen for 0.3 instead of 3 seconds, Frostbite only removes 1% of their maximum HP instead of 15%, and some others are just ineffective against them (e.g. Soul Link and Culling).
- Crosshair Aware: Dotted lines appear at the location a moment before Shoggoth fires its lasers.
- Cue the Sun: It's in the title. Survive 20 minutes, and all enemies spontaneously die as the sun rises.
- Deadly Gaze: The Glare upgrade periodically damages enemies within your vision range. One of its following upgrades also causes this effect to apply your gun's on-hit effects.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: All the characters are perfectly capable of shooting down eldritch entities. One of the bosses is even Shub-Niggurath, who's just as vulnerable to bullets as everything else.
- Dual Wielding: Dual SMGs are one of the weapon options. Gun upgrades independently affect them both, and since they fire two shots at a time, effects that trigger every few shots happen twice as often.
- Eldritch Abomination: Your foes are all Lovecraftian creatures.
- Endless Game: You can choose to play an endless mode, where you fight against the horde until you finally fall.
- Evolving Weapon: Starting in Version 1.0, all weapons get a choice of three evolutions when a player hits level 20 in a run.
- Experience Points: Enemies drop orbs when killed, which need to be picked up to fill up your experience bar and level up. This is often risky since other enemies might be blocking the way. There is also an additional "experience points" in the form of runes. These are earned at the end of a run whether you survive the 20 minutes or not and are used to buy from a list of potent special abilities or useless cosmetic items.
- Fallen Angel: For whatever reason, Shana is a fallen angel whose halo has been shattered.
- Flechette Storm: The Salvo Knife locks onto enemies as you move, and firing launches knives at them all at once.
- Fire, Ice, Lightning: The Fire/Ice/Electro Mage upgrades add elemental properties to your shots. Fire gives a chance to ignite enemies and cause Damage Over Time, Ice gives a chance to freeze enemies in place, and Electro causes a lightning strike on the enemy closest to your cursor.
- Gathering Steam:
- The Dragon Egg upgrade tree also includes two upgrades that boost its damage and attack rate each minute. They're available to pick up even if the dragon hasn't hatched yet.
- The Justice upgrade in the Holy Arts tree increases max HP by one for every 500 smite kills, up to a maximum of three additional HP.
- The Ritual upgrade in the Dark Arts tree boosts bullet damage by 1% for every ten enemies killed by curse damage.
- The Soul Knight upgrade in the Magic Spear tree boosts the damage of the Magic Spears by 15 every time you pick up a Soul Heart.
- The Feed the Beasts upgrade in the Trainer tree increases summon damage by 1% for every 15 enemies killed.
- Gradual Regeneration: With the Regeneration upgrade, you heal 1 HP every 90 seconds.
- Hearts Are Health: Not only are they shaped like hearts, they also resemble human hearts.
- Hoist by Her Own Petard: The grenade launcher's explosions do not discriminate between your character and the enemies. It's very possible to get yourself blown up by your own attacks if you walk into them.
- Holy Halo: Shana had one but it broke, but if you choose to she can eventually find the 3 pieces and mend it to restore some of her lost angelic might.
- Homing Projectile:
- The Salvo Knife's projectiles move towards enemies, but they need to lock on to enemies by running near them.
- The Bat Gun fires spirit bats that fly around the screen and attack any enemy nearby.
- The Cultist enemies in the Temple fire three bullets that slowly change their direction in mid-air to target the player.
- Humanoid Abomination: Hastur is a playable character and her special ability periodically summons a tentacle that hits enemies.
- An Ice Person: Yuki revolves around the freeze status effect, with the ability sending out a frost butterfly every six shots.
- Light 'em Up: The Holy Arts upgrade hits nearby enemies with swords of light when you fire the last bullet in a clip.
- Literally Shattered Lives: Shatter, the ultimate upgrade of the ice path, causes enemies to explode if they die while frozen, damaging enemies around them.
- Lost in the Maize: The Pumpkin Patch map limits your movement to left and right, and is filled with numerous pumpkin-headed abominations to fight.
- The Lost Woods: One of the areas is an endless forest filled with sinister trees.
- Lovecraft Lite: The monsters may be eldritch horrors, but they are still vulnerable to guns.
- Luck Manipulation Mechanic: Shana can reroll upgrades once per level, letting you better optimize a build during a run.
- Magikarp Power:
- The Dragon Egg upgrade summons a dragon egg that initially just rotates around your character. However, if you survive three minutes, it hatches into a powerful dragon that breathes fire on enemies.
- One of Shana's unique upgrades, Ascension, doesn't immediately do anything when picked. When you level up, there's a chance that an upgrade will be replaced by a piece of her halo, which also doesn't do anything. However, obtaining all three halo pieces will grant Shana a powerful upgrade.
- The Marvelous Deer: Dasher's skill allows her to transform into a reindeer every ten seconds which makes her invincible. It keeps her from shooting, but she can plow into hordes of enemies to kill them and grab XP. Miniboss upgrades allow her to summon a second reindeer and/or shoot snowballs while in reindeer form.
- Meaningful Name: Many of the characters' names relate to what they can do, e.g. Diamond having high HP, Spark having lightning abilities, and Yuki having ice abilities.
- Mechanically Unusual Fighter: The Watering Gun summons a Spore Flower that launches spores around you as you shoot it.
- More Dakka: Some guns like the Dual SMGs already have a high firing rate but skills such as the Quick Shot skill-tree and certain tomes can greatly increase your bullet dumping. Pumping out lots of bullets in succession is the other key to surviving this game.
- Nigh-Invulnerable: Dasher is indestructible while in deer form. Good thing as she has the worst health of all the girls.
- No-Damage Run: The "Nimble" achievement requires surviving a run without ever being hit.
- No Plot? No Problem!: The game never explains why you have to fend off an eldritch horde for twenty minutes.
- One-Hit Kill: The Assasinate skill will instantly kill enemies that fall below 20% of their regular health (easily done on mooks with a single shot). The Culling skill has a 15% chance of instantly slaying mooks.
- One-Hit Polykill: Some upgrades make your projectiles Piercing, letting them hit multiple targets. The Crossbow naturally has a high amount of Pierce, especially if you charge it up.
- Pacifist Run: The "Pacifist" achievement requires completing a run without ever firing your gun once.
- Percent Damage Attack: The Frostbite upgrade makes enemies lose a portion of their maximum health when they get frozen. This effect is much weaker on bosses.
- Pinball Projectile: Some upgrades, like Rubber Bullets, let your shots ricochet between enemies
- Playing with Fire: Scarlett is themed around fire, shooting a flame wave every three shots and with personal upgrades themed around buffing the burn infliction.
- Power at a Price:
- Several upgrades decrease some stats in exchange for increasing others. For example, Double Shot gives you an extra projectile per shot but slightly lowers your damage, and Big Shot greatly increases damage but reduces your rate of fire.
- The tomes dropped by bosses grant huge benefits, but require a substantial exchange like -1 max HP or 50% reduced bullet damage.
- Power Floats: Scarlett, Spark, and Yuki, who have fearsome Elemental Powers, float instead of walking.
- Razor Wind: The Cyclone Sword's projectiles take the form of short-range shockwaves.
- Regenerating Shields, Static Health: The Holy Shield upgrade absorbs one hit, and regenerates after 2 minutes, while health is impossible to recover without some high-tier upgrades.
- Serial Escalation: Many upgrades combine with other upgrades, rapidly leading to this.
- Shock and Awe: Spark's shots have a chance of causing lightning damage to enemies, and has personal upgrades that buff lightning strikes.
- Short-Range Shotgun: The Shotgun fires four projectiles which do not go very far at all, barely more than your vision range. Bullet Speed upgrades can increase how far it goes, but it's still unlikely to reach full-screen like most other guns. One of its level 20 upgrades, Melee Shot, makes its range absurdly short in exchange for massively increased power.
- Shout-Out: The "Giant" upgrade, which increases your max HP and makes you bigger, has a Super Mushroom as its icon.
- Sinister Scythe: The Magic Scythe tree gives you an orbiting scythe that counts as a summon.
- Spin Attack: The Cyclone Sword unleashes a spin attack while it's reloading.
- Spread Shot:
- The Shotgun fires four short-ranged bullets in a cone.
- Some upgrades increase the number of bullets per shot. Most notably, the Double Shot upgrade adds one extra projectile to each shot, and leads to Fusillade, which doubles your weapon's base projectile count while also adding two extra shots on top of it.
- Stronger with Age: The Dragon Egg's tree has two abilities that make it more powerful every 8 seconds to imply it's growing up
- Summon Magic: Each girl can learn to summon a baby dragon, a ghost and various animated objects. Some girls like Raven have a unique pet as part of their abilities.
- Superboss: If you kill a tree in the forest, the timer freezes at 00:01 and you have to fight an additional boss if you want to survive.
- Tech Tree: The level-up upgrades follow a path of acquisition. Getting the base upgrade makes two more available, and picking one of those makes one more upgrade obtainable.
- Temple of Doom: The temple map has walls on every side, limiting your movement options.
- Unlockable Difficulty Levels: Surviving for 20 minutes unlocks the next Darkness level, up to 15, which adds an additional modifier per level to make things harder.
- Unrealistic Black Hole: Luna's ability creates a black hole on reload, which pulls enemies from a short distance in.
- When Trees Attack: Even the trees in this place are evil. Getting too close will cause a glowing red eye to open, and actually touching the tree will damage you.
- Yuki Onna: Yuki, as her name suggests, is based on the Yuki-onna. On top of the name, she floats around instead of walking, wears a kimono which conceals her feet (Japanese ghosts are often portrayed without feet), and has ice powers. The achievement for beating Darkness 15 with her is called "Yokai".
- Zerg Rush: Your enemies will fill the screen in their attempts to overcome overrun your guns. Good thing you have supernatural powers too.
