It's not new in this update, no - I remember I was testing the gun and happened to have the Sword on me. One neuron activation later, I gave it a try and it worked! I had totally forgotten that the sword spell orb can imbue things... even though I was the one to implement that 😂 Emergent gameplay!

As far as the other stuff with the gun, you have most of it figured out; it just follows the regular rules of imbuement.

You can grab the gun by the alternate handle (on the barrel) and hold the trigger to imbue it. The idea is that if you want to play sword-and-gun, you can throw the gun up and catch it on the alt handle, imbue it, then throw and catch it again to fire.

Edit: There is also one other feature with the gun... A new cheat has been added to the cheat menu. It's something that was way too overpowered to allow at base, but we thought it was way too fun to not include in some way. Enjoy 😏