GONNER2

Art in Heart’s GONNER2 is the follow up to their 2016 title (you guessed it): GoNNER, which looks equally as interesting, but admittedly I’ve never played. You play as Ikk, a little dude with an interchangeable head, who is out to help Death rid her lair of a mysterious presence apparently. Nothing really told me that aside from the game’s own listing on the store, which definitely baffled me a bit. A procedurally generated title, you never really know what you’re in for when you set off on your quest - and with a game that doesn’t hold your hand in the slightest, I felt very lost.

Ikk is made up of a tiny, blobby body, and that’s pretty much it. You can pick up a skull, as well as a backpack and a gun to protect yourself with, and off you go into the weird and wonderful levels to… well I’m not 100% sure exactly. You start each level by pressing A “to die” and get pooped out by a weird cat-worm. Reaching the end of a level also results in you being eaten by one of these creatures, only to be pooped into the next level so I guess this is just how you travel in Death’s world… I suppose that kinda makes sense? Enemies are varied, and levels can be completed with or without defeating all of the enemies you come across. I tried to just speed-run through levels but it wasn’t long before I became overwhelmed. If you get hit, you’ll drop your skull, as well as the backpack and gun, so you’ll need to be fast to snatch them back up again. Without your skull, you are completely vulnerable - one hit will take you out.

Controls are straightforward, with A to jump, RB to shoot and RT to do a little dash. Control your movement with the left stick, and your aim with the right stick. You can attack enemies with your weapon, or you can boop them on the head Mario-style if you want to conserve your ammo, although more ammo is continuously dropped by defeating enemies or running through certain flowers. But where the controls are simple, the actual game is not. With very little guidance in where to go or what to do, combined with the roguelike style - it’s extremely challenging, and frustrating at times. Dying pings you back to Death’s Lair, where you’ll begin the whole process again - and in my case, this became an endless loop.

The absolutely gorgeous colour palette and art style of GONNER2 is what drew me in initially. The chalky level artwork is really nice to look at, and almost goes against the intensity of the levels themselves being that the colours are very calming, instead of the typical bright reds and neon colours we typically associate with chaos.

As you play through GONNER2, you will discover new weapons and heads that can be equipped, and thankfully these carry over between deaths. Reaching these unlockables takes a lot of patience, as you are almost guaranteed to die about a million times before you ever come across any. The more you play, the more you start to almost understand things, in a strange kind of way, which did improve the experience - but it is still a bit of a mindfuck. Unlocking new weapons such as the grenade launcher or heads such as the Gun Head, which will continue to shoot whilst you shoot your actual gun, help to make things a bit easier and also encourage you to keep going.

There’s a local co-op mode available, allowing for up to four players to play together, helping each other navigate the complete chaos. At £10.74 on the Xbox Store, or free if you’re a member of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate - it’s a good price for what may give you hours upon hours of gameplay, if you can convince yourself to keep pushing through after each death. For us, it’s a title that we might come back to at some point but I just couldn’t see any progress whilst playing due to repeatedly dying so this kinda pushed me away from it. Allan on the other hand, is a huuuge roguelike fan, and whilst he struggled to get into it at first, eventually got far enough to start enjoying it and seeing some progress. This is definitely a game for the more hardcore fans of brutal roguelikes, rather than those looking for a simple run they can just fire through when they choose.

In the end, we decided to give GONNER2 the Collecting Asylum rating of 7/10.

Have you played GONNER2 yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to Raw Fury for the GONNER2 Xbox One review code!