Brainwash Gang’s Roguelike Game Nongünz Released
Dulce Bellum Inexpertise: these words stand engraved over a massive shrine of swords, guns, and skulls. Beneath the shrine reside dozens of rescued worshippers, praying for whoever (or whatever) saved them from the demons within a ruined cathedral. Armed with a gun the size of their body, the player rises from the cathedral’s graveyard, and once again enters the unholy doors to face the creatures within.
Dive into the world of Nongünz, a Gothic-inspired platformer filled with tons of guts and guns. This roguelike game takes the format of Rogue Legacy and meshes it with the style of Bloodborne. With almost two dozen weapons and abilities, and a brutally unforgiving level design, Brainwash Gang’s first title will put your computer-gaming skills to the test.
The game takes place in and around a massive cathedral, where the player must shoot their way through rooms and defeat the level’s boss before proceeding further into the church. Every level includes shops, treasure rooms, and challenges that can get you great guns and upgrades. Treasure chests litter each level but keep in mind that you must sacrifice health in order to open them. Depending on your health bar (and your own self-confidence), it might be better to leave some loot alone.
Apart from defeating the boss, your objective is to collect points and deposit them at the massive shrine outside. In order to leave the cathedral, you need to escape through windows found throughout the level. If you die, you lose not only all of your points but also all of your weapons and upgrades. Since leaving the church also restores your health, you should keep a sharp lookout for those windows.
You’ll quickly learn that collecting points from killing enemies alone won’t fill the shrine much. To help speed things along, try rescuing the people you come across inside the church. You’ll find them in cages dangling in the background. Once you free them, they’ll escape the church and start worshipping beneath the shrine. Each worshipper generates one point per second, so rescuing just a dozen of them can generate more points than killing enemies ever could.
The game’s controls seem pretty standard for a platformer: WASD to move, mouse click to shoot, SHIFT key to use abilities. However, the game throws you a few trickier controls that make gameplay a lot of fun. For instance, the S-key doesn’t make the player crouch or point down like it does in most platformers. Instead, the player slides across the floor, aiming his weapon upwards. This maneuver allows the player to shoot enemies above him but also risks the player falling off platforms or into spikes.
Like so many games, Nongünz’s biggest issues lie in its glitches. Fortunately, the player might not find all of them detrimental. Opening the menu pause the player and all enemies, but supporting items and worshipper bonuses still work. In other words, you could (theoretically!) enter the boss room, deploy a turret using one of the skull abilities, open the menu, and kill the boss without ever getting hurt. The same principle applies to collecting points from worshippers: just open the menu, grab a sandwich, and by the time you’ve finished lunch you’ll have 12,000 points you didn’t need to work for.
Some players might take full advantage of these cheats since Nongünz is by no means an easy game. However, players just looking for a challenge might see these glitches as cheap shortcuts. Perhaps Brainwash Gang knows about this issue already, so if you’re eager to beat the game ASAP no matter what, take advantage of this tip before they create a patch!
The last feature worth noting is the quit menu since it throws the game’s entire dynamic for a loop. After opening the menu and quitting the game, you find yourself controlling yet another character: a silhouette of a gamer playing Nongünz on his desktop computer. You can move this framework gamer around his attic room and do a few other activities. Look through a telescope, play the ukulele, try to unlock a safe box in your desk drawer. In the end, however, the only way to completely quit the game is to have this silhouette player go to bed.
Maybe Brainwash Gang added this quirky feature for some hidden reason revealed late in the game, or maybe they just wanted to have some fun. Whatever the reason, playing a gamer that’s playing Nongünz creates a strange sense of distance from all the pixelated gore. If the guns and guts and images of violent death weren’t remarkable before, they certainly aren’t now.
Nongünz is available now on Steam for Mac, PC, and Linux.
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