I had some friends over yesterday to celebrate my birthday and we sat down around my Nintendo Switch and played the new game everyone’s been raving about, Untitled Goose Game.
If you haven’t heard of it, Untitled Goose Game is an indie title where you control a goose whose goal in life is to rain down misery and mayhem upon the residents of a small village. You are given a list of things to accomplish, such as making an old man fall on his bum or trapping a kid in a phone booth, and as you complete the tasks on your list you are granted access to new areas with new people to terrorize.
This game was a blast to play. It features simple, yet attractive visuals with an impressive level of attention to detail. Your avatar, moves in a way that resembles a real goose and the game’s physics engine is pretty impressive. The controls are simple and I found them to be easy to get a handle on. You can grab objects with your beak, run, crouch, flap your wings and honk at villagers to startle them or get their attention. The camera controls could be improved upon; you have the ability to voom in and out a bit, but I would have liked the ability to shift the camera’s perspective. A minor gripe, but there were a couple of places where this ability would have come in handy.
The puzzles have you wreak havoc on the lives of the innocent villagers and were humorous and oddly satisfying to complete. Most of them weren’t super hard, but might require some trial and error to figure out. My friends and I found that sometimes you would need to play around in an area for awhile and try interacting with different things and observe how the villagers would react before a solution would present itself, but we were usually able to work things out before too long. There are also multiple possible ways to accomplish certain goals, which adds to the fun.
Playing as a group was a great experience. We would pass the controller to the next person each time we completed an objective and having a group of people coming up with suggestions and strategies was definitely helpful when trying to figure out some of the trickier problems. Some of my friends would also try things that I wouldn’t have thought of, which resulted in a lot of laughs. One friend tried honking while our goose was carrying a bottle in it’s beak, resulting in a hilariously distorted sound that was a nice added touch of realism I likely never would have got to witness if playing on my own.
My one main critique of Untitled Goose Game is that it’s a bit short. We were able to play through it in around 3 hours. There is a post game, which I have yet to try, where you play through the same areas but with new goals to complete. This offers a nice added bang for your buck, but it still would have been nice if there had been a couple more areas.
In my opinion, Untitled Goose Game is worthy of all of the praise it’s been receiving and I highly recommend it. It’s an entertaining, surprisingly detailed, puzzle game with a really funny ending that had me and my friends all howling with laughter. It’s a little on the short side, but if that concerns you I would recommend just waiting until it goes on sale and picking it up then.
Final Score 8.5 out of 10
What did you think of Untitled Goose Game? Have you tried the post game? Let me know in the comments!
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