Untitled Goose Game PC, Switch
Developer House House Publisher Panic Format PC, Switch (tested) Release Out now
Depending on your particular belief system, the goose is either nature’s way of keeping us humble, or God’s best mistake. Whether it was a curious series of evolutionary events or some butterfingered deity, somewhere along the way the misanthropic soul of a wasp got transplanted into a big duck. Who could have predicted that this would eventually gave rise to one of gaming’s greatest antagonists? Only House House, it seems. Untitled Goose Game casts you as one such feathery malcontent, and tasks you with terrorising a sleepy English village in increasingly specific and hilarious fashion. And while the game’s non-title – a placeholder that, thanks to sheer Internet notoriety, is now official – feels like a gag taken slightly too far, in every other respect, developer House House’s comedic instincts are spot on. Being a goose, it turns out, is possibly the funniest joke in videogames; Untitled Goose Game tells it immaculately.
There’s an enjoyable nuance to being a goose, you see. On the face of it, you’re a jester, cutting a waddly strut through vegetable patches and pub lawns. You’re able to tap one button to flap your wings, and another to honk: there’s the sense that this endears you to the village’s blank-faced Play-Doh people, who in response turn to briefly contemplate your existence before going about their lives once more. This is their first mistake. You, as the goose, also have the ability to crane your neck low and high, and clamp your beak onto a variety of things – as well as the mental faculties to completely ruin someone’s day. You’re never a danger, merely a nuisance. This means that no-one can really do anything about your efforts beyond flapping at you and hoping that you don’t try it again, which of course you always do. You are, effectively, invincible. It is the mildest power trip in the world, and extraordinarily satisfying.
You’re given a to-do list of objectives such as “get the groundskeeper wet” or “make the man spit out his tea” for each area of the small, but neatly interconnected village. Through a mix of puzzling and light stealth, you’ll achieve your goals: some are tests of dexterity or cunning level routing, perhaps asking you to nick someone’s slipper off their foot, or pilfer certain items from a shop and drop them into a shopping basket. In the latter instance, taking advantage of cover from handy tables, or using distractions (such as cleverly placed walkie-talkies and a well-timed honk) avoids your thievery being foiled by an angry woman with a broom.
Other objectives require a little more deduction. Engineering a scenario so that you can get a boy to wear the wrong glasses, for example, means spinning a few logistical plates at once. House House often allows for various puzzle solutions: you can sneak into the pub with a honk of misdirection and a quick shimmy, although you’ll deprive yourself of the comedic – perhaps even referential – treat of the intended disguise. Indeed, Untitled Goose Game quickly becomes a game of balancing the game’s own excellent gags and pratfalls (clearly inspired by British sitcoms from the ’70s such as Fawlty Towers and Last Of The Summer Wine) and your own improvisational comedy.
House House affords so much time and space to really perform as the goose: it’s by no means essential, but it’s the sort of game that benefits from a few onlookers, as you lead pursuing villagers on a farcical chase around a flower bed, or stick your beak in an errant traffic cone and honk an echoey honk, or strut around with a stolen tobacco pipe after having dumped the contents of a washing line in a pond. It’s all soundtracked by a pitch-perfect incidental piano soundtrack that responds to what’s happening on screen: creeping your way through a hedgerow like a downy Jaws is made all the funnier with the thud of base notes scoring the action, and legging it out of the pub with a pint glass ready to be dropped in the canal elevated by the cheeky plink-plonk of keys.
There are moments, however, when imprecise controls can get in the way of the fun. Untitled Goose Game neatly points out things you can interact with by putting a small white starburst around them when you get close enough. But when multiple objects or interactables end up in proximity to each other, the game will sometimes autocorrect to the wrong item. And while the vast majority of puzzles are logical, there’s at least one that stumps us entirely until we watch a friend finally manage to execute its rather woolly solution. Neither of these issues are too grating, however: if you grab the wrong thing by accident, you can often try again almost immediately – and you don’t need to tick absolutely every puzzle off a to-do list before unlocking the next area, just most of it.
On the whole, then, Untitled Goose Game is much more elegant than we expected to give it credit for. The broad concept was always going to be entertaining – for exactly how long was unclear. But House House has done a very silly idea its due diligence. The details are delightful, from the time that we discover that honking from the other side of a fence of a goose statue causes its owner to double-take, to the little ‘oh, shoot’ motion the pub landlord makes when they lose sight of us, to the running gag of villagers making anti-goose signs in response to your shenanigans (if only geese could read, eh?). Most importantly of all, the brief Untitled Goose Game is exactly as long as it needs to be. The entire thing is wrapped up in a neat setup/punchline structure, with the inspired final area and challenge of the village bringing it all together – you’ll want to make sure to explore the tutorial area to see a mysterious sight that’s brilliantly contextualised by game’s end. With the best will in the world, then, Untitled Goose Game is just one big joke. And what a laugh.
Being a goose, it turns out, is possibly the funniest joke in videogames; Untitled Goose Game tells it immaculately