20 Minutes Till Dawn

Good but abandoned.

It's a pretty good game with lovely artstyle. While it is a bit lacking in terms of replayability, it still can offer some 10 hours of solid fun. My main issue at the moment lies with the endless mode - it becomes too easy and repetitive too quickly, there's not enough variety in enemies and bosses to sustain this mode for more than an hour. Having only 3 base stages can also be a bit of a let down for sure, having been spoiled by the likes of Vampire Survivors and Halls of Torment. That aside, it's a solid title and I enjoyed every minute in it. I'd easily give it 6.5/10.

20 Minutes Till Dawn is a nice little bullet hell game that you can grab dirt cheap on sale. It is not doing anything groundbreaking but it is still very fun to play. There are a lot of characters and builds to choose from so each run can feel different. The game also has a good variety of weapons and each one evolves into a stronger form during a run and it can significantly change your playstyle since it affects how the weapon behaves. After beating a run you unlock higher difficulty levels. Each Darkness level adds new modifiers to your run like faster enemies or increased enemy HP which makes the game harder and gives you a reason to keep pushing and improving. There is some grindy progression since it takes a while to unlock everything but the gameplay itself is enjoyable enough that it does not feel too bad. Overall if you like bullet hell survival games or just want something addictive and replayable for cheap this is a solid pick and worth checking out.

The steam version of this game has been abandoned for a while now. It is still an alright vampire-survivors-like, but has always kind of felt like an early access game. Still quite fun, just unmet promises.

Dev basically abandoned the game, no news on the update that was announced back in 2024 in favor of putting work into the much more lucrative mobile version, hasn't had an update since November 11th of 2023. INCOMPLETE, ABANDONED, DO NOT BUY. AVOID FUTURE PRODUCTS.

傻福司马作者跑路了，千万别买

[h2] 100% Achievement Review #21 [/h2] ● Estimated difficulty: 5/10 ● Approximate amount of time to 100%: 25 hours ● Online achievements: none ● Number of missable achievements: none ● Difficulty based achievements: none ● Minimum playthroughs: many short runs, given the nature of the game ● DLC required: no ● Glitched achievements: none [b] Notes [/b] 20 Minutes Till Dawn is a pretty poor version of Vampire Survivors, there is very little variety when it comes to builds, weapons, enemies, maps and QoL. The thing that these games live or die on is precisely the variety when it comes to builds which 20MTD right off the bat hinders, you can choose 1 weapon and a character, which you either upgrade or spec into a summon playstyle. There are essentially 3 builds you can go for, which is simply shooting everything, a summoner playstyle, or an element based build. 99% of the time however like it or not you will be shooting your enemies which is made difficult by the fact there is no ability to autoshoot. You can autoaim but you will still have to hold down the button which is a bizarre choice, this alone would make the game much more enjoyable only because holding down left click for 20 minutes per run is simply not fun. There is also hardly any strategy needed as to where you should be shooting as most playstyles simply benefit from shooting as much as you can and there arent that many enemies that you would need to prioritize to warrant auto shoot not being an option. Another thing is the variety, as you can see by the gameplay videos and screenshots most of the game is dark, there are hardly any interesting maps (there are only 3) and moreover the enemies in there are simply reskins (sometimes not even animated) of the enemies from previous maps. There are maybe 1-2 unique enemies in the different maps but it is just not enough. When it comes to the difficulty it has a pretty weird curve where early on you will be dying at the exact same time for a long time (atleast I did) and then suddenly get enough upgrades to finally push past and finish a run. This leads into the achievements which has you having to grind out a stage until you get to darkness 15, then each of the achievements is pretty much beat darkness 15 with each of the characters and weapons. There are a handful of miscellaneous achievements like beating a stage as a specific character with the grenade launcher and only using its special ability or having 8 summons by the end of the run. One saving grace is that the game comes at a really great price point, 4,99 euros for this is very fair and I respect that, however it just wont push the game to a positive review. One thing to also mention the game was seemingly abandoned on Steam, having an update ready in the beta branch for over 2 years with no update in sight, while as far as I know the mobile version is getting updates, so dont count on it being updated anytime soon if at all.