Thanks to Digerati for the review code
Title: Nongunz: Doppelganger Edition
System: Xbox One
Price: $14.99
Release Date: 05/06/2021
Story
This game is a pretty strange one on the queue. Honestly, one reason it took me so long to cover this (besides the usual “2022 was packed and I got distracted“) was because it was rather hard to really understand the game or what I was doing. The game description just outright says the whole game is a big riddle, which doesn’t help matters, and unlike retro games that were pretty heavy on the riddles/cryptic stuff, Dialogue doesn’t really exist here, not even with some of the menus, and the game in general is just a weird trip that’s impossible to describe.
Presentation
Just as was noted above, Nongunz has a very bizarre art style, going for a seemingly monochromatic look at first before the world quickly evolves to get some sense of color and shading, yet at the end of it all, the game is still rather simplistic looking and reminds me of something out of a comic strip. There are menus to bring up, but these have next to no text whatsoever, so before you figure out what option does what, this design choice makes navigating these menus pretty confusing, and the closest you get to any dialogue is a how-to-play guide for the control scheme outside of the main dungeon. At the very least, the “real world” and in-game world look distinct enough from one another, and in motion the game looks fine.
Gameplay
Nongunz is a roguelike, tasking you with going into a chruch and making your way deeper and deeper, defeating bosses and gathering the resources you need in order to discover the riddle behind the entire game. And wow, what a riddle Nongunz is. In my nine year history of Seafoam Gaming reviews, I think this game may be one of the most cryptic games I’ve ever given a go. While in say, the La-Mulana games the fun came from solving and memorizing the puzzles to make your way around an interconnected area, Nongunz somehow manages to be even more cryptic than those two games, since as was noted above the game is very, very light on text and if you’re wanting to play this as intended, you’ll be fumbling around quite a lot, and not in a fun way.
How light? Well, how about “next to no text outside of a tutorial billboard you can easily miss” light? Still, I will at least give the game some props for having an OKish control scheme once you do wrap your brain around it. You have your typical jump with A, and you fire your weapon with the RB button. Why this couldn’t be remapped to RT is beyond me, but I was able to get used to the RB firing after a while, and it made for pretty decent rapid fire potential once I found a position to hammer away on the button.
You also have a few dodge techniques to try out, and while these seem pretty useless at first, with the slide not even having any sort of noticeable invincibility frames, these do end up useful in certain situations, with the Roll being more effective for getting out of the way, and the slide being a clever way of shooting upwards, which really helps when taking out airborne enemies. Along your journey, you’ll find a variety of treasure and items, which can grant you a variety of buffs or various effects, and certain effects tend to be really beneficial, while others end up as less noticeable effects, but can still be used to recover a tiny bit of health by throwing away their card, so even if you get an item you do not want, there’s still some merit in keeping it around until you need the health back.
As a roguelike, the rooms in Nongunz are randomly arranged and generated, meaning that you can go from a pretty calm treasure room immediately into a fierce den of enemies. Shooting will increase a main shot count, and defeating enemies will increase that meter even more, with the ability to raise and continue a combo meter if you defeat another foe before time runs out. This can lead to a nice risk/reward aspect if you wanna take a chance at wailing away on enemies instead of prioritizing safety, but even if you do choose to go with the latter option, you will not make it far in Nongunz without lots and lots and lots of practice, for this game is fiercely hard.
See, when you die, you’re sent back to the hub town, which is pretty typical for a game like this, and you have to go in again and keep trying until you get to the next area. The problem is, even the first area is a gargantuan, monumental spike in difficulty that despite my near hour of attempting to clear the first boss, I was only able to get him down to 50% of his health, and that was after sacrificing some of the treasures I found to restore some of my own. By that point I had gotten used to the mechanics and the quirky nature of the game and could see the general loop opening up ever so slightly, but even with that practice the mountain is such a climb that I had to eventually throw in the towel to just finish the review already.
In any other roguelike, I wouldn’t really even be bothered by this, as you can try and try again until you break that barrier of entry and get good at it, but in the opening bits of Nongunz, that barrier is still absurdly high. If you do manage to triumph here, I can absolutely see it being a satisfying victory, but even beyond the bosses you still have the obtuse, text-less nature of the game and the cryptic puzzles of the game along with the outer world (where your main character leaves his computer to check on a safe, go on a treadmill, or examine other strange things that can correlate to the main adventure) to solve, and while the simplistic look and quick packing to get into a run was cute at first, it does leave this as a much less fun and approachable game compared to the dozens upon dozens of other challenging, yet rewarding roguelikes we’ve seen as of late, even during the very year this game came out. The game controls well enough that I can’t really call it cheap, just very not for the faint of heart, so I can only advise that you play Nongunz if you’re ready for a lack of hints, huge riddles, and a fierce fight from the getgo that’ll make the 1985 Tower Of Druaga era of the Famicom blush.
Conclusion
Nongunz was a very, very tough game to get into the writing mindset for; the prior times I took notes on it, I didn’t really get far in a run, nor did I really understand the game. Even now after playing it more and understanding the mechanics thanks to existing documentation in the years since this came out, I still can’t say I’m a fan of it. The roguelike structure is confusing and the core gameplay loop just isn’t that engaging, especially with the overly cryptic nature of it all, and even if you do manage to grasp the controls, the sudden difficulty spikes and other strange design choices (hope you like enemy residue causing you damage) really do make this a roguelike with a higher barrier of entry than almost anything else I’ve played for the site.
The dialogue-free nature of the game also is a bit bold, but it quickly goes down to being frustrating and vague more than something that benefits the simplicity and makes the experience click. There are some fun elements in Nongunz like the chaining and the cool techniques to figure out such as using a slide to shoot upward, but really even now that I understand some of what to do, I can’t say I’m a fan of actually playing the game, and I can totally see why I bounced off it really hard trying to review it in the past.
Now that I dove head first and brute forced my way to the first boss for an hour though, I ended up feeling more annoyed than anything else, and it becomes very tough to recommend this over the many other alternatives at Nongunz’s current MSRP. Maybe consider taking this one on only if you want a true cryptic challenge and won’t mind this being a higher barrier than other recent roguelikes.
I give Nongunz: Doppelganger Edition a 5 out of 10,