GoNNER

GoNNER is a procedurally-generated 2D platformer with roguelike DNA, developed by Art in Heart and published by Raw Fury. The premise is deceptively gentle: you play as Ikk, a small and largely misunderstood creature trying to cheer up Sally, a giant landlocked whale who is his only friend in the world. To do that, you descend into strange, dark places hunting for the right trinket. It sounds almost cozy. It is not. GoNNER will kill you constantly, and it will do so with a kind of cheerful indifference that feels almost philosophical. What separates GoNNER from the wider pile of roguelikes is its commitment to feel over function. Movement has a floaty, deliberate weight to it that takes real time to internalize. Ikk bounces, tumbles, and fires through hand-crafted-feeling procedural rooms, and each run you assemble a loadout from detachable heads, backpacks, and weapons that genuinely change how the game behaves. A new head alters your stats and look. A different backpack shifts your special ability. Guns range from standard projectile types to stranger, more chaotic options. The combinations create a build system that rewards experimentation and punishes passive play. You will find a configuration that clicks for you and you will mourn it when you die three rooms later. The audiovisual presentation is where GoNNER earns its most earnest praise. The visuals are abstract and deliberately lo-fi, rendered in a palette that shifts between stark and saturated depending on the biome. Enemies dissolve into chunks of color. Backgrounds breathe. It has the quality of something drawn very quickly by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. The soundtrack by Jonatan Soderstrom (also known as Cactus, one half of Hotline Miami's design duo) is hypnotic and slightly unsettling in all the right ways, the kind of music that loops in your head hours after you close the game. Together, the sound and visuals create a mood that most bigger-budget games spend millions trying and failing to manufacture. The difficulty is real and the learning curve is steep. The first several sessions may feel more frustrating than rewarding, especially if you are coming from more forgiving roguelikes. GoNNER does not hold your hand or explain itself fully, and some players will bounce off that opacity entirely. Runs are short by design, but that also means the sense of genuine progress can feel slow. If you need a roguelike that gives you persistent upgrades or meta-progression to stay motivated, GoNNER is sparse on that front. What it offers instead is a mastery curve, the slow satisfaction of runs getting longer not because of unlocked power, but because you are learning the rhythm of the thing. For the right player, that is exactly the point. GoNNER is a small game that knows what it is and commits to it completely. The six-to-ten hour runtime to see a proper ending feels precisely calibrated. It does not overstay. The emotional thread connecting Ikk and Sally is thin but genuine, and it gives the whole enterprise a warmth that pure mechanical roguelikes rarely manage. If you have patience for abstraction, a taste for punishing but fair platformers, and an appreciation for games that feel handmade at every pixel, this one deserves your attention.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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