20 Minutes Till Dawn Review (Katsuni)
This is not a bad game, but it's definitely nowhere near at the top of the list for the genre and it shows pretty quickly. This is not truly a "do not recommend" it's more "don't recommend as your first purchase in the genre, or the second, or probably even the third" which is kind of an issue.
In short, vampire survivors is much better and substantially cheaper, and holocure is just free, but also better quality. If you're not sure if you like the genre or not, pick up holocure. If you do like the genre, get vampire survivors instead. Once you have exhausted those and are looking for more of the same sort of thing to keep things interesting, then you can pick up 20 minutes till dawn as something else to do, but there are other options that are probably better as well, I just haven't tried all of the others yet to know which order to rank them in yet.
Either way, it's definitely not a BAD game by any means, and you can definitely get some fun out of it, but... I can only recommend it after you have exhausted the cheaper, better options available.
Gameplay itself is a bit different in that you get a gun to start with as your starting weapon, which is something you purchase separately and they're clearly meant to be fairly similar in power to each other rather than having any "best" one, but some definitely are below or above the starting revolver by a bit. You're expected to actually aim, which makes it much different than most of those in the genre, though pressing spacebar lets you set the gun to autochoose targets, but it's probably better to do it manually and you won't be getting much else anyway.
Unlike most of the others in the genre, there aren't a lot of other passive weapons that fire in specific ways. To start with, it's like a scythe that spins in a circle around you, or a tiny derpy dragon pet that doesn't deserve the name dragon that takes 3 minutes before it does anything, or a ghost that plinks at targets for low damage constantly. You can build for gun/summon damage a bit, but there's not a lot of variety.
As other reviews have already mentioned, the upgrades are pretty much just purely numeric. They don't change the shape of your attacks, add any interesting effects other than applying standardized status effects, and generally you're going to find the builds you make are... not reaaaally that interesting.
There are other characters! ...They don't really do hardly anything different as far as I can tell, and you're probably better off staying with the original guy because he's the only source of RNG-mitigation it seems. He lets you reroll your options once per level, which is useful but still pretty heavily RNG based since you can reroll the same options repeatedly. There does not appear to be other randomness protection that I've seen so far, which is a bit less of an issue in that there isn't a lot of stuff to choose from in the first place and the stuff there is to choose from doesn't have a huge impact.
The upgrades themselves are very small techtrees, 1 top option, opens to 2 side options, and lead to 1 bottom option. So you can get to the bottom with 3 choices, or get all 4 eventually. Picking one side doesn't lock off the other like some other games that do this kind of setup, it's just a small gate to limit how many choices you can get at a time rather than proper RNG-mitigation. "Aha, we just won't offer you the options in the first place!" is an awkward way to handle it.
The enemies themselves are mostly standard fare, but some are pretty annoying. The bosses are pretty much all just bland "charges in a straight line at you" for the first and second of the three zones so far, most enemies just slooooooowly move towards you. If you bump into a tree in the forest it can damage you which was unexpected, but it's mostly standard fare. There's a cultist-like enemy in the second zone that fires three heat-seeking projectiles with a brief delay between them which is... awkward in a game that so heavily is against taking any damage at all; the good part is they have a wide turn rate and a timed life, so if you sidestep them once they'll miss easily, and they'll despawn just after they turn around so you don't have to worry about the second pass. It's still really weird to put in anything with homing projectiles in at all though and to then negate the majority of its homing effect, so I'm not really sure what they were trying to do there.
TL : DR - It's a solid B-tier game... but there are vastly better games that are much cheaper (or free) in the same genre already. It's not a bad game to pick up after you've already beaten the others and just want more of the same but worse, but I can't really recommend it as an isolated purchase. If you've played through a bunch of the others already like holocure (free and better) or vampire survivors (cheaper and better), then go ahead and get 20 Minutes Till Dawn, but it's a more expensive straight downgrade, even with the -35% sale I got it on. You can still have fun with it, it's still not a bad game, but it's a more expensive, lower quality game than is standard for the genre and even only a few hours in, it becomes really obvious that this isn't going to change at any point during its gameplay as it would require a massive shift in the basic design philosophy.