Untitled Goose Game (Xbox One)
To some, a goose doesn’t seem much different from other waterfowl like a swan or a duck. On the internet though, geese have an achieved a memetic level of infamy for their aggressive and territorial behavior. Untitled Goose Game taps on the bird’s increased renown for malice without indulging in anything overblown, the playable goose’s mischief-making without deeper meaning and more akin to pranks than outright harm to the individuals it has chosen to torment.
The unnamed goose at the center of this unnamed game sets off into a humble little town with no immediate endgame apparent. Once it has encountered one of the innocent residents of this unsuspecting burg, a checklist makes itself known, the goose needing to complete a series of actions before they are offered the task that will let them progress to a new part of town with new people to harass. This little list of activities mostly amounts to a series of tricks you’ll be playing on people, things like stealing a gardener’s rake and dumping it in a lake, pulling the stool out from under an old man right before he tries to sit down, or rushing into a T.V. store and creating a ruckus. Many of these actions definitely have a tinge of meanness to them, but for the most part, the citizens of the town are just irritated by the goose’s presence and can revert to their regular lives after tidying up from the animal’s antics. Things are definitely softened some by a soft art direction, everything presented through solid colors without outlines. The people of the town have almost no facial features, their reactions conveyed only by body language or punctuation marks that appear overhead, and since they lack any means of speech, they have to pantomime any communication they have such as when you start swapping the possessions of a set of neighbors to create a minor bit of drama.
Your capabilities as a goose are fairly limited, the animal actually fairly realistic in the portrayal of its range of actions despite having a degree of intelligence and cunning the bird only has because of who is controlling it. The goose can carry objects around in its bill, the nature of the object determining if it has an extra function or if it can be properly carried at all. For example, the goose needs to drag around the rake due to its size, but it can easily carry around a radio and bother people with the music playing on it. Most of your activities somehow involve a degree of problem solving, some outright puzzles like finding the right objects to satisfy your to-do list, tricking a resident into an action like making the gardener accidentally hammer his thumb, or avoiding trouble long enough to get away with an item or prank. Most residents will try to shoo you away from any important area or outright block you from stuff that is meant for humans only, so to that end, the goose actually needs to employ stealth tactics, one method it has for doing so being its honk. By drawing attention away from the area of interest by creating a racket, you can rush in and grab what you need or get past pesky villagers. Other methods of stealth like hiding in bushes or under tables also join this surprisingly sneaky bird’s repertoire, but your own abilities are fairly limited, the only other actions tied specifically to your character being the ability to open your wings up in a manner that doesn’t factor into your to-do list much and really seems to be tied to the game’s true main goal: messing around.
Untitled Goose Game’s checklist gives the player a handful of objectives for each of the small areas in town, but the actual act of completing many of these aren’t really where the game’s appeal comes from. The to-do list is essentially a suggestion of silly interactions to have with the game world, many of the means of completing these tasks immediately apparent once you’ve seen the description and found the pertinent characters or items related to it. Your guided mischief making is still meant to be a little silly, employing slapstick and comeuppance to decent effect, but the actions are often fairly shallow and too straightforward for their own good, the playfulness of the activity lessened by having it prescribed and related to one very rigid concept for an interaction. If you are only goal-focused in playing Untitled Goose Game, you’ll find this short game dries up fairly quickly and isn’t quite the raucous experience it’s become known as, and while there are some checklist items that will be funny because their concept is strong enough, the appeal of the game doesn’t come across well by approaching it as a traditional gaming experience.
However, if the intent was to have fun messing around on your own in Untitled Goose Game, this aspect comes up a bit short as well. The areas of the town in which you can interact with people and objects don’t have a great degree of flexibility. If you find something while playing that seems like it’s a unique interaction, it’s likely part of the second to-do list set you receive for beating the game, meaning you’re still acting in accordance to a structure that doesn’t really help the experience. The to-do list is almost an all-you-can-possibly-do list, the citizens acting in fairly predictable ways, most objects having one function, and your goose unable to create any huge commotions since the game tries to have everything snap back to regular human life after your chaotic intervention.
Playing Untitled Goose Game feels like you’ve been set down in a playground on your own, and to an adult mind, you can only get so much enjoyment from the rigidly defined purposes of the schoolyard equipment. However, a playground can be made more interesting by having others with you and going against the intent of the equipment with them, and while Untitled Goose Game isn’t loosey-goosey enough to give you outright freedom to mess with people as you please, having others watch as you play or watching someone comedic on a site like Youtube play it can help bring out a lot of the intended humor of the experience. The goose at the center of the game is transcendent, not really meant to be simply a tool for playing around in the game’s world but a creature that represents the spirit of mischief permeating the experience. It cannot provide the anecdotal stories that a more free form design would allow it to create, but its attitude, its unrepentant desire to cause trouble for no reason beyond it has the opportunities to do so, speaks to that part of the brain where we like to be a little naughty, and in this virtual world of no consequences with faceless characters who won’t suffer, we can indulge in it a little without having the moral weight of being rude to another human being weigh on us. If the spirit of the goose can reach the spirit of the player, the barrier of enjoyment can be broken despite the limited design of the title, the actions on the list feeling less like a walkthrough and more like you and the game planning a devious little prank together, the enjoyment of pulling it off fleeting but a decent means of filling time.
THE VERDICT: Untitled Goose Game’s design is more focused on character and the feel of the title than the actual mechanics and activities featured in the game. Characters behave too consistently, your skills are too limited, and the actions on the checklist are rigidly resistant to alternate solutions, the puzzle solving and stealth feeling plain if viewed solely as functions or gameplay systems. Despite the village not really being built to reward going off script much, Untitled Goose Game is still mostly enjoyable because of what it embodies: the desire to be a little naughty without consequence. Causing trouble and seeing a mildly humorous result feeds that desire to be bad just enough, and if you can turn playing the game into a social experience focused around being silly instead of playing the game, you can break through its simplistic structures and have a brief bit of fun.
And so, I give Untitled Goose Game for Xbox One…
An OKAY rating. Untitled Goose Game immediately evoked memories of Surgeon Simulator and Goat Simulator for me, mainly because those games draw much of their appeal from what you’re not meant to be doing as well. However, both of those do feel a bit more conducive to messing around or finding nontraditional solutions to their loose structures whereas the checklist activities in Untitled Goose Game are both fairly few in number and the extent of most of what you can even do in the game. It’s a sandbox where you are meant to make your own fun but it’s not quite built for it, but that doesn’t mean that the game is either overly bland when played straight or without any room to be enjoyed as a platform for creating humorous situations. The honking goose, bumbling townspeople, and items perfect for making a mess combine into something that can be contextualized into something enjoyably ridiculous by the right player or mindset, but a game’s built-in quality can’t really be judged by the very funny video you found on Youtube of someone cracking jokes as they play. It is built in a way that can feed these individuals material and hence it works not just as a social experience despite being only single player but it also evokes an attitude that has lent itself well to internet memes.
The goose’s chaos is without reason, it’s unrepentant in its mild mischief, and the absurdity of this animal pulling it all off fits the bill for what people sharing silly things on social media enjoy, but for anyone late to the Untitled Goose Game internet zeitgeist in five or ten years, you’ll be pretty much left with just the substance of the actual experience. Some silly animations and situations reward the mild puzzle solving and stealth to a degree where it won’t be outright boring or without character, but this untitled title depends a lot on player temperament and social contextualization to be more than a simple game about doing simple things.