World of Goo‘s graphic design excellence more than makes up for it’s lack of polygons or multitudes of frames of animation. It’s a mix that is equal parts cute and surreal, made more pleasing by the game’s high levels of visual polish. World of Goo‘s visuals come off like a cross between the work of Jhonen Vasquez ( Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Invader Zim) and Terry Gilliam’s animation on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. To think that such a small team devised a game this perfectly coordinated is nothing short of mind blowing. None of these new goos come off as gimmicky or forced. The game manages to maintain enough variations on the “rescue the goo” theme that it never once gets old. It’s like Lemmings, only interesting.Īt first you’ll just be using the goo to create bridges and towers to get your little blobby children to the escape pipe, but before long you’ll be using green goo to create a re-constructible structure to climb out of a pit, red matchstick goo for detonating gigantic explosions, Skull goo to traverse a plain of spikes, digital missile goos the list goes on and on.
Each level requires you rescue a certain amount of goos before you can move on to the next level. The goal of each of the game’s levels is to find a way to get your goo in gear so they may make it to an on-screen suction pipe, which whisks them back to the safety of the World of Goo Cooperation. These little weirdos exist in basically three states: “sleeping” (unusable to the player), “crawling” (usable by the player) or “placed” in a greater structure (reusable or unusable by the player, depending on the goo’s type). The game puts you in the role of an unseen savior of “the goo”, cute little blobs of slime who double as your damsels in distress as well as your primary tools of rescue. Despite it’s flagrant weirdness, World of Goo remains one of the few games I can’t imagine anyone hating. It’s a definitively indie game, filled with moments that could have only been devised by artists more concerned with expressing their ideas than turning a buck (especially when compared to similar yet inferior games like Nintendo’s own Cubello and EA’s Boom Blox). World of Goo has everything one could ask for in a game: it’s got simple, easy to learn controls, beautiful graphics, great music, high re-playability, style, depth, and class.
Released on WiiWare October 13th, 2008, on PC October 17th, 2008 Hit the jump to find out just why World of Goo is so flippin’ fantastic. What I got instead was the closest thing WiiWare has to a title as original, accessible, and amazing as Braid. With this standard of quality in mind, I started up World of Goo, expecting to get a moderately fun time waster something to play after I’d beaten every other game I already own. That’s arguably a pretty enormous difference, though neither game is likely to show up on anyone’s top ten best game of 2008 list (even Luc Bernard’s). WiiWare/PC releases are becoming more and more the norm these days, ranging in quality from Eternity’s Child to Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People. Today marks the release of World of Goo on PC, a game that WiiWare owners have been playing since Monday.