Bizarre fusions are always fun. It doesn't matter if it's an apple and a pen or the master sword and a plush doll; there's something fun about the idea of two seemingly disparate things becoming one better thing. Gunbrella'sname pretty much sells it all. You play as a poor, down-on-his-luck man in a ruined world. He comes home to find his house aflame, his wife dead, his child missing, and a mysterious weapon on the ground. Half shotgun, half umbrella, this Gunbrella is his only hope of learning who attacked his family and what happened to his child.

The Gunbrella is not an ordinary shotgun strapped to an umbrella. No, it is something more. You can use it to dash through the air, drift upward on wind, block and reflect bullets, bounce on the ground like Scrooge McDuck on a pogo stick, and yes, it even keeps away rain. (Weirdo.) Despite sounding silly, it's quite nice to see how the Gunbrella is versatile and simple to use.

With the tap of a button, players can pull out the -brella part of your Gunbrella. Do it while moving forward to dash. Hold up, and you'll be Mary Poppins. Stand still or hold the button, and you can block ranged attacks (and reflect them with proper timing). Hold it near a zipline, and you can scoot across the line. Underwater, you can swim faster. It's mostly context-sensitive, but as far as we were able to play, it feels smooth as butter. After a relatively short learning period, I was able to zoom through stages with ease.

Combat revolves around shooting the Gunbrella. The basic attack is a short-range shotgun blast that includes a somewhat lengthy reload time. You're usually powerful enough to one-or two-shot weaker enemies, but the range limit means that you have to use skills to approach or reflect enemy attacks. You can use agility to sneak behind an enemy before they attack or close in quickly and block bullets, so you can unload a few rounds into their face.

You can find alternate ammunition types that offer other options. A grenade is a high-damage crowd-clearer, while rifle rounds have a much greater firing rate, damage and range. The risk with these weapons is that ammunition is limited. You can buy ammunition from stores or find it in chests, but usually, it's rare enough that you want to be conservative with it. Likewise, you can find an abundance of healing items and craft new ones (such as cooking a delicious slice of dead rat).

Our preview build only gave us part of the adventure, but we also played enough to see that there are going to potential alternate paths to explore. Early on, I had to infiltrate the base of a cult. An out-of-the-way area contained a rare blue gem. Before I went in, I was told by two characters that the gem belonged to them. One was a seemingly insane sewer dweller, and the other a merchant who promised rewards if I brought the gem and threats if I didn't. I'm not sure of what my choice will mean in the final endgame, but at the very least, I had to think a bit before I handed it over.

Gunbrella is shaping up to be a darn fun adventure. It's incredibly easy to pick up and play, and the atmosphere and plot are interesting enough that I was curious to see where the developers are going. It's certainly not stone-cold serious, but a lot of the humor comes from dark responses to silly situations, such as the game treating the existence of the Gunbrella as akin to a legendary superweapon. I'm really looking forward to seeing the final version when it hits later this year for the PC and Nintendo Switch.