At this point I don’t think this game really needs any introduction…however…
I, like many innocent children, was the victim of a goose attack. Now the fact that I may have been antagonizing it with a friend of mine is largely beside the point, the fact still remains that a creature almost the same size as me chased me out of its territory with a series of loud honks and small nips at any part of my body in reach. Thus I came to the conclusion that geese are terrible, terrible animals and so when I saw a game that allowed you to be terrible as a goose I was immediately sold on the premise. So began an almost year long wait for it to come out and, whilst I was somewhat disappointed that it came out on the Epic Store first, I wasn’t going to let that stop me from tormenting others in the same way I had.
It is a lovely day in town and you are a horrible goose, set out to ruin everyone’s day. You have a mission, although that won’t be revealed to you until some time later, which in order to complete you have to make your way through the town proper. However it’s clear that this isn’t the first time you’ve been through here and the town is decidedly unfriendly to geese. From wary shopkeepers who watch your every move to barkeeps who won’t even let you in the door it’s clear that you’re going to have to do your geesely worst in order to get what you want.
Untitled Goose Game utilises a low-poly, low texture visual style that’s still all the rage with indie devs these days. The benefits of doing so are numerous: texturing is easier, the game will run on anything built in the last 10 years and you can hide a lot of mistakes and other mischief when you’ve got a bunch of solid colours lavishing everything. The animations, for everything except the goose, are decidedly low fidelity and are most likely hand animated. For a game whose main premise is all about mischief and mayhem the cartoonish art style fits in well.
Every level in Untitled Goose Game has a set of tasks for you to complete, the culmination of which will then allow you to move onto the next one. They start of pretty straight forward, mostly requiring you to get an item from A to B but the later levels require you to trigger certain behaviours which can be done in a variety of ways. This gives the game a kind of Hitman-esque feel to it as there’s always an obvious solution but every so often you’ll complete a puzzle in a really weird way and that will get you thinking about what you possibly get away with. The answer to that question is, surprisingly, quite a lot as the speed runners and glitchers have aptly demonstrated.
None of the puzzles are particularly challenging however, the most difficult of them mostly just amounting to needing to do something several times over or needing to wait for someone to path into the right spot so you can complete it. Unlike Hitman though none of the cycles are particularly long so you’re not going to be waiting around for ages in order to pull something off. For a casual game like this though I think that’s appropriate since anything too difficult would get in the way of the fun of Untitled Goose Game and there’s certainly enough of that to be had.
The game does have a few rough edges though, mostly stemming from the game’s level construction. Invisible walls abound everywhere and some interactions with the NPCs can see you get stuck behind or around them. It’s also possible to lose certain key items thanks to janky physics interactions although, thankfully, they’re all restored quickly upon a restart. The game could also be a little better at indicating when you’ve figured something out correctly but aren’t timing well, like with the old man in the pub with the dart board. I tried honking at what I thought was the right time multiple times over only to have it not work for some unknown reason. It finally worked on the third try though, oddly enough.
Really there’s not much more to say about Untitled Goose Game other than I think it’s just good fun. It’s not often that you come across a game that does so many things well, especially from a small indie studio with only a single other game under their belt. Untitled Goose Game also doesn’t overstay its welcome either, clocking in at a mere 2 hours for a first play through. In all honesty this is a game I’d love to see on Steam with Steamworks integration as I think the community could have an absolute field day with building custom levels for it. Hopefully that comes in the future as I really haven’t had my fill of being a terrible creature in a sleepy Australian town.
Rating: 9.25/10
Untitled Goose Game is available on PC and Nintendo Switch right now for $19.99. Game was played on the PC with a total of 2 hours play time.
