Nongünz:

rating: ゞ◎Д◎ヾ


Dev Site / Steam Page

I'm still not sure if I completely understand how to play this game. On the surface Nongünz is a macabre rogue-lite shooter. You play as a headless skeleton traversing a randomized dungeon filled with mucus flinging disembodied limbs. The dreary sound design, harsh black and white aesthetic and extreme difficulty create an atmosphere of oppressive nihilism. These factors coupled with its brazen lack of hand holding bring Nongünz into the realm of (bare with me) conceptual art.
From the start you're very intentionally not given any kind of objective or context about the world outside of its most basic controls. Opening chests reveal virtual cards that increase your stats. The specific stat is represented by a preplexing 16-bit glyph and equiping them takes a portion of your health. Almost all the games mechanics are occluded like this, adding to the pervasive uneasiness and isolation. At first I thought I had missed something from the tutorial so I tried to restart. This was also incredibly confusing as the menu U.I. is also a bunch of virtual cards with no text. "Exiting" the game takes you to a full color bedroom where the player avatar (now a featurless white anthromorph) gets up from their pc and interact with items in their bedroom.