Tag: Nintendo Switch

The Pure Gaming Joy of Untitled Goose Game

NateLeave a comment
cover image

Those who follow video gaming might already be tired of hearing about Untitled Goose Game, the new indie title from Aussie developer House House. While it can be hard to gauge the extent to which anything captures the zeitgeist these days, it feels like this weird little indie game where the player is a goose tormenting a quaint English town has struck some kind of chord with people. It’s exactly the sort of game that the internet loves, goofy and meme-worthy, and people who aren’t charmed by it will probably get sick of hearing about how charming it is. As I played I found myself with several moments of pure joy, the joy of discovery and of the chaos I could rain down on this little village. But that joy extends beyond the chaos in its soul and the slick presentation. There’s some really sharp game design in Untitled Goose Game, and regardless of how short the game is, the whole package is worth talking about.

Certainly a huge part of Untitled Goose Game’s success comes from the protagonist. There’s a certain satisfying silliness to that white goose as it waddles around and honks at people. It’s able to run, but it sacrifices its maneuverability when it does so. It can also duck its head down and sneak slowly through areas, or it can manipulate its environment with its beak. Some items are small enough for the goose to carry them around, but others have to be drug slowly along the ground. You can even flap your wings around to punctuate the movement with a little extra goose-i-ness.

Aside from the on-point animations, these actions serve as a sort of toolkit for the player. The game does a great job at broadcasting when you can interact with something in your environment, whether it’s a switch you can flip or a flower you can pick. The world around you is filled with things like this. The overall effect is a little like a classic adventure game. You have the range of actions you can take with a range of items, and it’s up to you to figure out how to combine them in ways that will accomplish your goals. Untitled Goose Game does a great job at creating a living environment, populated with people who you can experiment on like rats in a maze.

And oh what people they are. If I had to point to any particular factor that makes this game work so well, it would have to be the population of this poor little hamlet. Everyone is going about their own tasks, and they all respond differently to you. Some will ignore you unless you try to do something irritating. Some will actively chase you away if you get to close, or will run away if you chase them. They have favorite activities, favorite objects, and predictable behavior, and as a result they broadcast enormous amounts of personality. It’s these characters that elevate the game beyond an adventure game, into the realm of games like Thief. This is an environment that the player can use to create their own solutions. When you are able to mark off any of the objectives the game gives you, it doesn’t feel like an achievement. You feel less like someone who solved a puzzle, and more like Bugs Bunny, tormenting and hassling people who give off the distinct impression that they need to be taken down a peg.

in-game shot
Look at that guy reading his paper. Thinks he’s so smart. (As you can see, he’s missing a slipper because I stole it.)

This setup allows for moments where I literally laughed out loud. Some of the townspeople are just begging to be picked on, like the shopkeeper who chases you with a broom or the lady who has filled her yard with tacky lawn ornaments. There’s a vaguely anti-authoritarian vibe to the whole game, where you get to rain chaos on people who like things to be in their own place and will not abide any minor changes, thank you very much. The village is rendered with a stuffy British air, and it feels really satisfying to bring down everyone’s property value a bit. The presentation, while suffering here and there from things like characters clipping into each other, is generally really nice looking. It’s done in a cell-shaded style with excellent animations and graphical cues, making the game super easy to comprehend and pick up.

A lot of that last part comes down to the actual design of the game. This is one of those titles that does a great job of teaching you how to play. It places you in distinct areas of the town, what in game terms are basically levels. After giving you a series of goals to accomplish, it will eventually give you another task that will open up the next area. It’s not exactly a seamless open world, but it feels like a cohesive whole, which is what counts. The four areas in the game all build off of each other expertly. The slow build in complexity makes each successive objective that much more satisfying. And without spoiling the fun, it ties together in a finale that almost made me want to stand up and applaud. It forces the player to draw on all of the mechanical lessons they have learned, while still taking the whole narrative full circle in a satisfying and hilarious way.

In this regard the game reminded me of another short, punchy puzzle game that captured gamers’ imaginations and led to a hundred tired memes: Portal. Like Valve’s classic game, the power of Untitled Goose Game comes down partly to its acknowledgment of its limits. It has a strong concept that it returns to over and over again, building on it in ways that also serve to generate some black-hearted laughs. And just when you begin thinking you’ve had enough, it has the good sense to end. To be sure, this is a very short game, taking me perhaps 2-3 hours to work through the main story. (There are bonus objectives to play after the finale too.) But at no point does it overstay its welcome, and I never felt like it was holding out on the good stuff just to make sure I had so many hours of play. I’m in my mid-30s now, and my gaming time is valuable. Untitled Goose Game respects its audience enough to use its concept for all its worth and get out before it overstays its welcome.

I don’t want to praise Untitled Goose Game too much, because a huge part of its power is in its modest intentions. This is not a triple A title, and a lot of people will balk at paying $15-$20 for about three hours of play. But in that three hours I laughed out loud numerous times, and it encouraged me to experiment and goof around in a way that few other games do. Anyone who has ever dealt with geese in real life knows what a pain they can be, but after seeing things from the goose’s perspective I can kind of see why they act like that.

Why Super Mario Odyssey Feels Different

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Super Mario Odyssey!

In keeping with my tradition of buying every Nintendo console roughly two years after they launch, I finally got myself a Switch in June. The first game I bought for it was Super Mario Odyssey, because if you are a Nintendo gamer you are almost certainly a Mario fan as well. I’ve been plugging away at the game for a few months now, and I’m beginning to appreciate more and more the different atmosphere it brings to the franchise.

Granted, it’s taken me a long time to nail down what it was that feels different this time around. I did know that I enjoyed the game, but it was a question of how much, and more importantly, why. To figure that out I’ve had to think about a lot of the patterns in the major Mario games. There are two generally accepted modes in which Mario has existed. First of all, there’s what I’ll call “stage-based” Mario. These are the games where the basic flow of the game is to get Mario from point A to point B. Whether it’s a flagpole in Super Mario Bros. or a star in Super Mario Galaxy, these kinds of games exist as clear challenges with obvious goals, and the tough part is surviving a gauntlet of some kind.

The second kind of Mario game is what I call “free-roaming” Mario. Until recently there was only two games in this tradition, but they had a huge impact. The first one, Super Mario 64, has long been lauded as a trendsetter in the medium, the first time that exploring a 3D space felt intuitive and comfortable. Here it was no longer about a clear goal with an obvious finish line. Now it was about repeated visits to the same areas, exploring every nook and cranny. You would select a star to seek out, but it was sometimes what must be done was rather oblique. It’s no coincidence that with this new style of gameplay, Mario’s moveset expanded drastically. Mario 64’s direct sequel, Super Mario Sunshine, followed the same format, and even added a new set of movement mechanics in the form of the water-jet-pack FLUDD.

Super Mario Odyssey is clearly much more of a free-roaming Mario game, but I think its strength lies in just how thoroughly it commits to that model. Again, it’s helpful to think about Mario 64 and Sunshine and how they contrast with Odyssey. Those games had open worlds to explore, but kept the model of set goals for the player. If you achieve that goal you are moved back into the hub world, whether it’s Peach’s Castle or Delfino Plaza. You might have to work out how to solve a specific problem, but like stage-based Mario games, the experience revolves around attaining goals. You need to swim down to the bottom of the lake and explore a shipwreck, or you need to use your jetpack to reach the top of some tower. When you get there, you get a star and you are taken out of the stage. The big difference between the free-roaming games and the stage-based games is not the nature of the goal, but the ability to move in three dimensions. Mario can do whatever in whatever order, but he still needs to do stuff. Those two streams of Mario games have a different execution, but they both revolve around achievement.

Mario attends a playoff game in Green Bay.

Contrast that with Odyssey, where the central mechanic of collecting Power Moons feels almost incidental. Rather than acting like the goal for the player to achieve, they are another kind of collectible. First of all there are a ton of them, over 800 of them if you’re counting. Secondly, there are also a whole range of ways to get them. Some of them require intense exploration, but some of them require simply talking to the right person or putting on the right kind of costume. Since there are so many of them, even the most casual player will find hundreds. The “story” portion and its levels are gated behind specific numbers of discovered moons, but you can actually reach the final Bowser battle with less than 250 of them, less than a third of the total in the game. So after the final boss fight, mostly all that’s left is to keep on discovering them. There are very few explicit goals. It’s just about hitting a certain number to unlock a couple of big boss fights, and unlocking new costumes in the store. Anything you try to accomplish after that is purely player-driven.

Odyssey is therefore the first Mario game to feel like it has no real goals besides running around and exploring every corner of the stage. The game encourages experimentation, because so much of that experimentation will give you another Power Moon. And when you find a Moon, you get right back in the game and keep going. This allows the game to get rid of a surprising amount of stuff that has previously been sacrosanct in the series, such as lives. Now when you die, you lose ten coins and respawn at the last checkpoint. You can try the same tough stretch again and again and never see a “Game Over.” The point is that the game is never over.

The result is a game that has a surprisingly breezy attitude. Previous games in the series, 64 and Sunshine included, emphasized challenge. You need to get good enough to beat something, almost to prove you deserve the reward. This challenge also ramped up as the game went on, though that challenge would take different forms. Maybe the game would force you to get through a storm of enemies without getting hurt, or emphasize perfectly-timed platforming. Some of the later areas in Mario 64 function as a sort of one-way loop, forcing the player to redo large portions if there was a mess-up. There’s not much difficulty ramp-up in Odyssey though. There are certainly big challenges for the player in the endgame, but the vast majority of the post-boss experience will be spent essentially screwing around. This exploratory attitude also explains the grab-bag aesthetic, like the oddly realistic humans in New Donk City and the goofball costume combinations that players can create. This is a video game designed as a big toy, rather than an achievement.

I think we can all agree that more games could use mopeds.

I don’t want to be too hard on 64 and Sunshine, because they’re great games. Both were made under some serious time constraints, and in the case of 64 there was a limited amount of memory to work with. (This is why other characters fade in and out of existence based on how close they are to Mario.) It’s hard to completely reinvent the language of video games, and somehow Mario 64 pulled it off. But the fact remains that both are not as refined as they might be. Sunshine in particular has a lot of visible seams. There’s the endless hunt for blue coins, and some punishingly tedious levels here and there. Odyssey feels much more assured in this regard, like the dev team took exactly as much time as they needed. They also benefitted from a lot of experience in making games like these. Mario 64 and Sunshine laid the groundwork for what Odyssey perfected.

Odyssey shares a common beef I have with any game that allows a lot of non-linear exploration, which is that it doesn’t have much arc at all. The challenge doesn’t really ramp up much, and since it’s entirely player-driven you’ll find things late in the game that are stupidly easy, right next to genuine challenges. That’s more of an observation than a complaint in this case though. I think the unstructured nature of Mario Odyssey speaks well to the power of open worlds in the first place. Challenge, while present in some late-game moons, isn’t really the point here.

I wouldn’t say Odyssey is my favorite in the franchise, because I need to sit with it for a few years yet. I would still at least put Super Mario Galaxy 2 ahead of it, the only other Mario game whose endgame is quite as expansive. But Odyssey does feel like the first time I’ve been given a completely different feel in these games. By committing so thoroughly to a different kind of goal, it feels surprisingly focused for as expansive as it is. It’s one of those games that rewards every moment you spend with it, and that is a sign of a lasting experience.