Nom Nom Apocalypse

My honest reaction after finishing a run of Nom Nom Apocalypse was somewhere between fondness and mild frustration, which is a pretty accurate summary of the whole experience. This is a top-down twin-stick roguelite built by a single developer, Josh Sacco of Deadleaf Games, and that origin story matters when you calibrate your expectations. The creature design alone earns genuine admiration: bosses like Noodurgora swing giant chopsticks at you, a layered gobstopper peels apart as you chip its health, and mid-run you might stumble into a teleporting cookie you have never seen before. That sense of discovery in the bestiary is the game's brightest spot. The moment-to-moment mechanics are functional if familiar. You carry up to three weapons at a time, drawing from a roster of food-themed arms: mustard shotguns, salt-shaker submachine guns, fork-launching crossbows, and butcher knives you can toss infinitely to pick up loot from a distance. Each of four starting characters brings a passive trait and an active ability powered by a Power Grease meter that fills as you kill. Unlocking additional Food Fighters requires meeting specific in-run goals, like a fifty-kill streak or dropping a boss without using your special. Perk slots carry over between runs, giving you a thin but real sense of persistent progression. On paper it is a tidy loop. In practice, the five procedurally generated levels cycle through similar grey rooms fast enough that by your third death you feel the repetition acutely. The core movement pattern that emerges is a well-worn one: backpedal in a wide arc while firing, rarely forced into anything riskier. It works, but it does not evolve. Co-op is where the game breathes most freely. Local two-player (or Remote Play Together, though the streaming overhead can degrade one player's experience) adds the kind of low-stakes chaos that makes repetitive design forgivable for an afternoon. Shared ammo and shared loot create small moments of negotiation and accidental comedy. Solo is tighter mechanically but lonelier, and certain perk interactions, like a magnet upgrade that hoovers all pickups to one player, reveal co-op balance that was not fully sorted before release. Reviewers also flagged camera-clipping rooftops, occasional sound dropouts, and geometry that can trap both players and loot. Nothing catastrophic, but noticeable on a game with under twenty user reviews and a mixed score on Steam. The presentation has a bright, cartoony energy that mostly reads well during chaotic firefights. Colour-coded enemies telegraph their behaviour clearly enough, and the soundtrack keeps the pace punchy, though it wears thin in the same way the level design does: the music does not shift or layer meaningfully as tension builds. The audio and visual craft show a developer with real instincts, just not quite the resources or iteration time to push them further. A single full run clocks in around four hours with a friend, slightly less solo, which is an honest length for what is here. The problem is that the roguelite structure implies a reason to go back, and outside of the achievement-hunter goal of unlocking every character, that reason is hard to locate. If you are someone who actively enjoys supporting small solo projects and the twin-stick genre is already a comfort food for you, there is a likeable scrappiness to Nom Nom Apocalypse worth a couple of evenings. Approach it as a short, goofy co-op session rather than a game you will return to across weeks, and it delivers on that modest promise. Just do not expect it to challenge Enter the Gungeon for a slot in your regular rotation.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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