N-GON, a new trippy bullet hell shoot-em-up, launches onto iOS

Indie developer Grigorii Makarov has dropped his latest project; a callback to the olden days of vector-based arcade games entitled N-GON. This retro bullet-hell shoot-em-up sees you taking on hyperfast and super intensely difficult trippy levels where you’ll control a singular arrow, dodging and weaving projectiles as you attempt to destroy the enemy.

In case you’re confused by what exactly vector-based means, imagine something you’d see in very old arcade cabinets or your local retro arcade bar. Games like Tempest or the classic Asteroids, where all of your visuals are fully based on simple geometric shapes and lines.

N-GON lands somewhere in between those two games in specific but really are most adjacent to your bullet hell of a choice, whether that be Ikaruga or DoDonPachi. There’s no deep story here, and no super complicated mechanics. Instead, you’ll be piloting a geometric arrow shape and blasting away projectiles against the other shapes on-screen, all while dodging massive amounts of bullets coming your way.

As is usual in this genre, one shot will do you in and get rid of one of your lives. You can always pick up power-ups, however, which will make your life a lot easier. These can range from a one-up, another life, or new weapons that will turn your linear projectile shooting into a shotgun blast or even laser beams.

Where N-GON really separates itself from the rest is in the visual department. Defined as an “acid trip”, it’s easy to see what N-GON is shooting for once you get into it. You can expect flashing bright colours, weird and trippy line-work, and a general visual mess that is both hard to look at and impossible to look away from all at the same time. This makes it quite unique and adds an extra layer of challenge to an already difficult genre by forcing you to look past the intense visuals to understand what’s all going on.

If a challenging and visually chaotic shoot-em-up sounds up your alley, you can purchase N-GON on the App Store exclusively right now for $3.99. Currently, there’s no word on an Android release, but cross your fingers that this experimental indie makes its way there soon!