“There is no greater sorrow than to recall our times of joy in wretchedness.” -Dante Alighieri, Inferno

So I guess it turns out that marketing isn’t always about deception. GoNNER, an indie game by developer Art in Heart and published Raw Fury, has been pitched to the player as a “tough as hell” roguelike platformer. Eternal damnation must be quite the challenge because this game is as difficult as roguelikes get, and anyone familiar with them can testify that they are indeed tough. But more on that later. As steep as GoNNER’s difficulty is, it’s not even the most significant feature of the game.

GoNNER is an ethereal game of colors and darkness without dialogue to guide you through its strange worlds. The game puts you in the shoes of some kind of amorphous being that falls like a droplet from the skies. This blob is named Ikk (as identified in material outside of the game). Ikk defines itself by putting on masks or heads, resembling various skulls.

Ikk befriends a floating spectral whale one night, a creature named Sally. Taking up arms, Ikk ventures into bizarre realms to fight monsters and ghosts, though the exact nature of his excursion is open to wild interpretation. And trust me, I’ve taken some time to try to discover what this game is all about but without much success. There are rampant “fan theories” and little else.

While some players have attempted to describe Ikk as an offspring of Sally or as a creature of the stars, an alien, or define the game as circular, this can’t be taken past conjecture so far as I’ve seen. It’s at least clear that death is a central theme in the game, especially considering its title and the appearances of the characters. The official description of GoNNER explains that the game centers around “the largely misunderstood and altruistic Ikk on a journey to cheer up his only friend in this world—a giant landbound whale named Sally—by searching for just the right trinket in the deep and dark places nearby.”

…But I didn’t really see that, even after making it through the game. It’s somewhat poignant in its mystery and imagery, though its dedication to abstruse storytelling may prevent some from engaging with it or from it being memorable in this area. A lot of it seems like an inside joke I never got let in on. The presence of the Victrola, the floating whale skeleton, the final scene certainly all baffled me.

Onto the structure of the game, something concrete.

Click here for the full review... https://thewellredmage.com/2017/08/18/gonner-2016/