In 2009 I played Prototype. It’s a sandbox game starring a knockoff Venom, going on killing sprees and eating people. It was lots of fun, in a way that made me wonder if I was a bad person for enjoying it.
Untitled Goose Game is kind of like that. Only instead of a bloodthirsty cannibalistic shape-shifting monster, you’re a goose.
The game sticks you in the webbed feet of the un-titular Goose, drops you in a sleepy British village, and invites you to embrace your inner asshole. The controls and layout are simple: Pretty much all you can do is grab stuff, run around, and honk. The challenge comes in using those meager tools to cause as much misery among the village’s population as possible.
There’s a charm to all of it, in a very Dennis the Menace sort of way. The simple cel-shaded graphics in muted colors, the basic sound effects, and the soundtrack made up solely of plunky piano music that’s intensely reactionary to your naughty actions. Though it’s not entirely without challenge, Untitled Goose Game is very much a “chill” experience. It’s more about planning and timing, with almost no call on twitch reflexes.
You’re loosed upon the village to spread your fowl malice. The game guides you with a gentle hand, suggesting some naughtiness you can enact in checklist form, but otherwise giving you zero direction. In the first area, it’s suggested you steal the gardener’s keys and collect a few items for a “picnic” on the lawn. Most of these are fairly obvious: You’ll need to sneak around the garden and steal stuff to bring it to the picnic area, giving the game a mild Metal Gear Solid feel as you hide things and keep the various humans from messing up your plans. (Later in the game you’ll hide in a cardboard box, because of course you will.)
There’s a thrill in causing befuddlement among the supernaturally patient humans of the village. They’ll chase you to retrieve their stuff, but never get so frustrated as to give you a much-deserved kick in the gizzard. Knowing that these humans are there just for you to pour out goosey wrath upon gives you an excuse to be the complete jerk that you (probably) aren’t in real life. You’d never be so juvenile as to tie a kid’s shoelaces together, trip him into a puddle, steal his glasses, and then replace them with silly sunglasses. Would you? The Goose would.
While most of the goals are fairly straightforward, a few hidden objectives create some delightful mayhem. My personal favorite was the sequence of events ending in this screenshot (and the answer to this puzzle qualifies as a mild spoiler, so heads up):
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