Review: GoNNER
I can’t think of a game that moves like GoNNER does. The world trembles at your every jump, recoils at every shot. It screams. It shakes. Bats, ghosts, walls; the further you go, the more they scream, flicker, shudder and flash. And then it’s over, it calms down. You start again. This debut from Scandinavian developers Art in Heart may not be the deepest platformer out there, but it sure leaves one hell of an impression.
At a surface level, GoNNER is a pretty standard platform-shooter with light elements of rogue-lite random generation: maps are random, but hand-crafted, and the game slowly unlocks a series of guns, items, and heads. Each Head changes the way your headless boy, Ikk, controls in some fundamental way: The Gun Head fires an extra bullet from your face, the Ant Face lets you glide. HP varies Head-to-Head, but running out of hearts gives you a Sonic-style last dash to pick up gear before taking a fatal blow.
Light on text, the game keeps it’s setup simple but rather obtuse. Your little headless protagonist (Ikk) has a whale (Sally) for a best friend. He wants to treat her, find her the perfect gift, and Death is here to help. The denizens of the dark worlds you visit? They aren’t too keen on you being around. That’s about it.
GoNNER follows in suit from a number of Ditto’s earlier work. The charmingly vibrant, chunky art direction is a clear follow-up to paint-gun platformer DAGDROM, and the whole structure of GoNNER is near enough a tidier re-imagining of Hets. It’s not a demanding style, but it is striking. Bullets bounce around with a gloopy heft, enemies explode into satisfying bursts of blobs. Artist and designer Ditto’s portfolio of work is filled with loose, experimental games, which you can see making up GoNNER’s DNA.
Tied into this is a hauntingly bizarre soundscape. Muted, dark ambience greet each level, mixed with a quirky spin; making way for frenetic, screeching licks as the action intensifies. GoNNER features a combo mechanic, where chaining kills and Glyph collection builds up the intensity of the soundscapes and visuals. It’s actually one of the most compelling uses of generative audio I’ve seen. Each set of five kills awards a glyph, and turns the music up a notch, peaking in a chaotic cacophony of noise, thumping bass and screaming rhythms; all the time the level flashes all the colours of the rainbow, shaking and shattering with every move. It’s impossible to get across in screenshots, but in motion it’s mind-blowing to behold
GoNNER isn’t a game that keeps the player coming back for days and days. A post-launch update added a daily challenge, and while fun, the lightness of the game’s mechanics don’t encourage replays to the same degree as similar titles. It’s probably the lightest of it’s contemporaries: there isn’t the item synergy of a Binding of Isaac here, or the weapon and upgrade variety of a Nuclear Throne. But there’s an undeniable, irresistible charm to GoNNER’s presentation that lets the brief few hours spent with the game shine.
