World of Goo

Upon completing the game, you’ll either want to go back to accomplish these harder challenges, or you’ll want to focus your efforts on the World of Goo Corporation. Basically, it’s that original Tower of Goo prototype with a significant addition: an online scoreboard that logs the height of everyone’s tower. Those heights then appear in your game as floating clouds, giving you something to aim for as you build up toward the sky. You can play this level at any time and it changes appearance with each new chapter unlocked, but you’re advised to wait till you’ve completed everything else before getting properly stuck in. All those goos you freed on every other level? They come here, giving you an increasing number with which to build. Just building, without the obstacles and only one type of goo, is fun. This is why the original prototype devoured our every spare moment for weeks. It’s so easy to just start dragging out goos and forming vertices – the whole game is controlled using one button. The little eyeballed blobs cheer and squeal in joy with every placement.



World of Goo isn’t massive, procedural or dynamic, but we want to come back to what we said earlier about its developers seemingly feeding everything in their heads into its creation. The first game that came to mind while playing was Darwinia, whose obvious reverence for other games made it feel like a passion project. World of Goo feels the same. Its every moment seems crafted with care and attention, and it’s clearly a personal labour of love for its makers, who quit their jobs at Electronic Arts and worked primarily in coffee shops in lieu of having office space.

The second game that comes to mind is Portal, which took a very simple concept and developed it into an imaginative, funny, polished three-hour gem. World of Goo worked out at more than twice the length for us, while being no less polished, or funny, or imaginative. Those are big names and may render your expectations unrealistically high, so here’s the negative. World of Goo’s list of flaws: sometimes, when there are a lot of goos, it can be hard to quickly pick the one you want. That’s it.

Oct 13, 2008