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Bjorn

Nongünz - Cookie Clicker meets Rogue Legacy meets Dark Souls

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Nongünz was included in this month's Monthly Humble Bundle, and it's totally the surprise standout for me.  It's a rougelite 2d platformer where you're exploring this cathedral/castle place.  You have a hub that populates with NPCs and stuff over time, which you return to when you die or when you elect to leave the castle by jumping out a window.  

 

There's so many good things going on in here.  The art style is gorgeous mostly black and white, with just splashes of color (enemies are color coded to give you an idea of their difficulty).   There is no text in the game.  Everything is communicated through pictographs.  There is definitely a learning curve, but the devs wrote a Steam Guide that's basically just a manual to help you out if you need it. 

 

The balance is really interesting.  You get passive powerups which are cards, that also double as your health potions.  But cards also expire over time.  So if you're trying to make a deep run, there's a persistent pressure on you knowing that your cards are expiring, and you may not be picking up enough new ones to replace the ones you're losing to healing.  There's no "perfect" build, it's just constantly dealing with the slow degradation of whatever you can cobble together. 

 

There's also an Idle Clicker element to the hub world.  You gather worshipers who produce points over time.  And every time you fire your weapon, you produce points, whether you're shooting an enemy or not.  And there are ways to make time pass faster, to build up points more quickly.  And this ties into the "mystery element" of the game, which you learn very quickly, but I'll put it in spoilers because it's relatively neat to discover.

 

Spoiler

It turns out that you are playing a guy sitting in his bedroom playing a video game. When you "exit" the game, you appear in the bedroom and there are various things you can do, like play with a ukulele, walk on a treadmill, look through a telescope or go to bed.  Going to bed is the actual exit to the game.  Walking on the treadmill makes time move faster in the game, making your idle currency production even faster. 

 

 

Overall the pressure of expiring powerups plus the Idle Clicker meta game element have just made this one of the neatest 2d roguelites I've played in a long time. 

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2 hours ago, Bjorn said:

It's a rougelite ... mostly black and white, with just splashes of color

 

Makes sense.

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I think I may ultimately end up quitting this without finishing it because of one of the things I liked about it so much. 

 

The fact that power ups both degrade and serve as your primary healing by consuming them means that there's a bit of an opposite arc compared to many roguelikes.  Rather than starting weak and building in strength, the optimum run sees you starting fully loaded, and steadily decreasing in power through a run.  As a concept I love this!  It creates a kind of time pressure to finish a run before all your cards burn out, leaving you suddenly very fragile while in the hardest level.  Unfortunately there's no easy to way restock.  You can hold up to 100 items, but the only ways to get cards in the hub are to buy them from a vendor 3 at a time (which you can reset, but it takes maybe 10-15 seconds to force the reset), or farm a slot machine, which doesn't produce cards any faster than resetting the vendor.  The slot machine cards appear to be of random quality.  The vendor's cards match the last level of the castle you reached (doesn't matter if you died or left voluntarily). 

 

The debilitating thing is that I ended up having 3 failed runs in a row.  First death was on the final level.  The next two deaths were both on the first level.  All my stockpiled cards are gone.  Many of my stockpiled weapons are gone.  My vendor is reset to the weakest cards.  And I have no money.   The only real option is to let the idle clicker portion run in the background for an hour or two to build up a bunch of money, and then manually spend the better part of maybe 20-30 minutes restocking all my lost goods. 

 

It's just frustrating that restocking between failed runs is such an onerous chore, and just jumping in without being well stocked doesn't feel like a valid path.  The devs likely thought it would feel like cheating or cheap or something to easily let players fully restock between runs.  But by making it a chore, it disincentivizes even continuing playing at all, since the exact same pattern might happen again. 

 

Which, the game does describe itself as nihilistic, so perhaps it is all intentional. 

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I'm enjoying the game a lot in my first couple hours, though I'm having a hard time figuring out a gameplay loop that works well for me. Do cards give bonuses passively and then heal when they're used (but you lose the passive?) I'm usually pretty good at figuring out games that don't use much text, but this one's pushing the obfuscation pretty hard.

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10 hours ago, Kyir said:

I'm enjoying the game a lot in my first couple hours, though I'm having a hard time figuring out a gameplay loop that works well for me. Do cards give bonuses passively and then heal when they're used (but you lose the passive?) I'm usually pretty good at figuring out games that don't use much text, but this one's pushing the obfuscation pretty hard.

 

Cards automatically give passive bonuses.  You have to manually "use" them from the inventory screen in order for them to heal you.  The bonuses can be seen in the stat page on the pause screen, but the early cards are weak enough that it takes a bunch of them to even register a single bar.  Once you can stack a bunch of cards from level 3 or 4, they effects of the bonuses become a bunch more obvious. 

 

You have 100 inventory slots for weapons, heads and cards.

 

The gameplay loop is the thing that I ended up finding so frustrating in this game, in that you're actively discouraged from jumping right back into the castle after a death or leaving.  I like a whole bunch of things about this game and I think it's one revision away from being a really wonderful take on the typical roguelike loop.  It just needs something that speeds up the re-equipping phase between runs. 

 

I ended up rage quitting and deleting it tonight after giving it another shot and wiping again.  If you finish it, I'd love to know what the secret at the end is (its related to the "exit screen", I know that much). 

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I assume the numbers that pop up before the bosses relate to the numbers on the box (though I don't know how many bosses there are.) My instinct to return to base frequently feels like it starts working against me after I get out of the first area.

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