Untitled Goose Game
Let’s have a gander
It’s a lovely weekday morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose, says the pitch for House House’s upcoming nature caper, currently referred to as Untitled Goose Game. The trailer swept across social media like nits in a playground, the delightfully spiteful protagonist honking its way through a to-do list of mischief. There are suggestions of stealth, of problem-solving, and of the ability to be a butthead to humans. I spoke with Nico Disseldorp—one of the quartet which makes up House House—about how Untitled Goose Game is shaping up.
House House have been referring to the project as ‘slapstick’. “It plays like the kind of physical comedy you might see in silent films,” says Disseldorp. “To succeed you have to trick people, steal things, hide in bushes, and honk a lot.”
The idea first surfaced when fellow House House-er Stuart Gillespie-Cook posted a stock image of a goose into a group thread with the caption, “Let’s make ‘a game about this.’
A key part of the appeal is how creatively spiteful it seems. “I don’t think you have to do much work to make a goose seem that way,” says Disseldorp. “We just tried to make a goose.”
Part of making that goose comes from actions you can perform. You have controls to honk, to move your neck, to flap and so on. The other part is how human characters react to you. “It’s often the groundskeeper’s responses that makes the goose seem so bad.”
The trailer shows a garden near a lake and an accompanying task list (“rake in the lake” and “get the groundskeeper wet” being two of the challenges). “We’ve got a bit more planned than what you see in the trailer, such as more spaces, characters, more items on the to-do list,” says Disseldorp. “But within each area the game the game is open and sandboxy.”
winging it
The closing moments of the trailer show two geese harassing the groundskeeper, so will there be multiplayer? “We aren’t ready to talk about it,” he says. “The day we posted the trailer, Jake (who is one of the devs and edited the video) asked me, ‘Does putting the shot with two geese in the trailer mean that we are making a co-op mode?’ and I said, ‘It doesn’t matter, I bet no one will see the video anyway’.” That was over 400,000 views ago.
Feedback since the trailer was released into the wild has been reassuring. “All the things people are excited about seem to be the same things we are excited about,” says Disseldorp. “So rather than change what we are aiming for, the reaction has given us more faith in our choices so far, and lots of encouragement that what we are doing is okay.”
House House have been referring to the project as ‘slapstick’