Ack! The tall human grabbed a broom! HONK!
No, no, no, no, no, run away, run away! I’m gonna lift my worthless wings (curse these loosey-goosey things) and trot away, trot trot trot. Don’t sweep me, ma’am…
OK. Whew. Gosh, in the madness of running away, I forgot that I have her carrot. It’s in my beak.
Why do I have her carrot? I just saw it and grabbed it. That was easy. That was fun.
Hi, I’m a goose, and this is my story
-
The goose didn’t caption these images, so they’re a bit more informative about what this actually is: a video game about being a goose. (Thanks for being good sports about us having a goose review its own game.)
-
Once you tap the game’s dedicated “honk” button, your goose emerges and waddles through a brief tutorial.
-
You don’t simply bend forward to get past weird terrain.
-
That posture is also imperative when either plucking items high or low.
-
And you’ll need to use both stances to get this door open.
-
It’s easier to goose around using a gamepad. Thank goodness for a dedicated “honk” button.
-
Yes, the dedicated “spread your wings” button is (mostly) for show.
-
Though the game opens with a giant pond, you mostly wander around on land.
-
How do we get this farm’s door open? Simple: pull one bag of fertilizer down in order to reach the radio on top. Then tap the radio to turn on its music. The farmer will run out and shut the radio off, at which point you can sneak into his garden.
-
BROOM! ACK! HONK!
-
Getting into this shop and getting your goose’s face on TV is one of this “level’s” required tasks.
-
You’ve helped create some confusion between the child and the market owner.
-
Hmm. We can’t reach that handle from this side. Eventually, you’ll reach the other side, at which point you can more easily return to various zones of goose silliness.
Maybe I should rewind a bit. I have the brain of a goose, after all. How big are geese brains? I don’t know.
I woke up in a quiet little field a little while ago. Green grass, some boulders, some trees. I shook my head from my nap, peeked out from a shrub, and began exploring. That immediately felt fun. (And it looked lovely, too. I took some photos. Don’t ask me how.) I saw a log, and I heard a voice tell me how to lower my neck to go under it. That was easy. Then I saw a tin can, and I got this sneaking sensation that I should bend down again and pick it up with my beak, which was also fun.
Then I saw a gate, but it was bolted shut. Hmm. I could tell I needed to duck my head to pull one post in the grass, then raise my head to yank another post. Clink, clank. Open!
… ha. I said “duck.” That’s a bird joke.
After waddling through the open gate, I heard a rustle of notebook paper, and I realized I had a list. Maybe it was under one of these worthless wings the whole time. Someone wrote on it in nice, cursive handwriting. Was it another goose?
I don’t really have a sense of time, “health,” or limits here. Those giant people who sweep at me with their hands or (ugh, the horror) a broom? They push me away, but I can always waddle back.
-
Every zone has its own list. This is the list you see in the farmer’s garden.House House
-
Read the review to see more about this “sun hat.” Notice here that your goose can’t quite reach it.
-
But if you pluck the garden’s single rose, the farmer will, without fail, bend down and re-plant it. And he takes long enough while doing so…
-
… for you to nab his hat, then hide in the tall shrubs. Once he loses you, he’ll be resigned to covering his bald head with the sun hat, and then the task gets scratched off!
-
Another zone, another list. (The first gallery includes examples of these tasks being completed.)
-
When you finish nearly every task on a given list, a “final” task appears. Complete it, and it will force a human to open an all-important door so that you can continue on your loosey-goosey way.
-
I tried honking at this guy, but it wasn’t loud enough to disturb him, so…
-
… I looked for something much louder. It did the trick.
Also, I can take my sweet time and ignore the list, but it’s a comforting thing to refer to. It gives me purpose. Sometimes, it’ll tell me to do something simple: pick something up, then drag it somewhere else. These little things always seem to annoy people. Why do I have to be annoying? I don’t know why my list asks me to annoy everyone. My first list suggested that I drag a farmer’s rake into a lake. “Rake in the lake,” ha! Honk! I laughed. I dragged the rake far enough, dropped it into the water, and laughed again.
But other stuff on the list isn’t so clear. It asks me at one point to get the farmer to “wear a sun hat.” I see the farmer, who’s wearing a really small hat, and I see the sun hat, which is out of my reach altogether. Curse these flightless wings.
What else can I do? Think, goose brain, think. After knocking out some simpler tasks on the list, I notice that when I pluck a rose from the farmer’s garden, he keeps bending down to replant the rose. Honk! That’s it! I can reach the hat when he bends down, so I do that, run to some shrubs, and hide by lowering my neck. I am a chameleon. He cannot find me in here.
That is a lie. I am a goose. But the farmer still can’t find me, and thus, he covers his bald head with the sun hat. I hear a “swip” sound of a pencil dragging across my list. Success.
We’re talking about Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood
Whenever a page on my list is mostly filled out, a single, “final” task appears. (If I get hung up on or can’t complete one of the original tasks on a list, that’s OK. Something in this weird universe gives me some leeway.) Finishing this “special” task on each list opens some new door to a new town square, or gathering of people, or some other very non-goose zone. I also get another list of tasks, and they’re also all typically annoying. My brain is feeble, but I can read the room: whatever I’m doing here, it’s not typical goose stuff.
As I’m doing all of this, I hear music. When I see people going about their routines, a floaty piano melody plinks in the background, as if I should notice what they’re doing. And when I alarm someone, the piano ditty sounds a little scarier, like something is about to happen. I’ve always resented that my mother didn’t encourage my artistic side when I was a gosling. I could’ve been great at piano, Mama Goose. But mostly, I like these little piano melodies. They goad me along, like something out of one of those children’s television shows I’ve heard about.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to in my little goose brain: this all feels very whimsical. Being a goose isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not like something out of these video games that humans play, where you get to honk around, be silly, or fake like, I don’t know, a goat or a ceramic mug. Humans have it pretty lucky.
But when I have these lists magically appear under one of my wings, and I get to take my time figuring out the chain of events I need to pull off with my beak, with no worries about hunger, or survival, or snakes (HONK!), I revert to a simpler time. Everything looks, sounds, and feels like being a gosling again. That’s all I want, and I’ll concede that I didn’t need long to finish my goose quest. But it’ll stay with me for some time.
The Good:
- You won’t find more pure whimsy in a 2019 game.
- Puzzles strike a delightful balance between tricky and fair, all while letting players reset and retry in a “Super Meat Boy meets point-and-click puzzlers” way; we’ve really never seen anything like it.
- House House’s knack for lively, cel-shaded characters looks marvelous in action and nothing like cheap Flash animation (meaning, don’t be fooled by the screenshots, which already look colorful and inviting).
- Dedicated buttons for honking (which affects gameplay) and flapping your wings (which doesn’t).
The Bad:
- Untitled Goose Game ends relatively quickly. But even that’s not so bad, considering the game achieves what it needs to in terms of puzzle variety and pitch-perfect annoy-the-humans silliness within its five-hour run.
The Ugly:
- I’ve yet to find a hidden level where the hero gets revenge on the foie gras industry, which would’ve been nice.
Verdict: Honk! Ahem, I mean, buy.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1570629