Untitled Goose Game

The Story

It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose. And, that is the whole premise of this game. You control a goose and go through the village and cause mischief and shenanigans as villagers trying to go about their day.

My Thoughts and Reactions Summerized

Untitled Goose Game has to be one of the strangest concepts for a game. The premise that you are a goose causing mischief, and that’s it. But when I played it, I was sucked in by its charm of being a goose. The art style and music of the game is simple and amusing. You get to honk, annoy, and discover what you can and can’t take to proceed to the next section of the game. A lot of the challenges just come from simple puzzles and fundamental stealth gameplay while creating a ruckus in the townsfolk’s daily lives. Untitled Goose Game is short, easy, and should take an average gamer one maybe two hours to complete. The game does have a replay factor if you get amused by goose antics, such as I am. At $20, it’s hard for me to recommend the game at that price, and you should wait for a sale if you wish to try the game.

Full Thoughts and Reactions after playing Untitled Goose Game

Have you ever looked at a game and thought, this has to be the dumbest and most wonderful things that I’ve got created. Untitled Goose Game is just that. A game with a title that developer House House used when they needed a title for their game at the Fantastic Arcade part of Fantastic Fest. They kept the title after fans showed approval for the name Untitled Goose Game. This game is a viral hit, just crossing the one million copies sold three months after it launched. The game has a growing fanbase and even spawned a few popular Memes across the internet. I played this game on my Xbox One through the Xbox Game Pass. 

Untitled Goose Game has a cartoony art style, but it works with the astheic. The simplistic style makes the game more amusing as The Goose is going through the village and causing a disturbance in everyone’s daily lives. The visuals add an appeal that makes the mischievous nature of the Goose and the antics that cause the gameplay to be fun. The game’s soundtrack is beautiful as well. At times quiet and other times, a piano starts to play, builds a perfect blend of silent and music scores as you play the game. Scored with musical passages from Claude Debussy’s Préludes called Minstrels. There are two versions, one performed normals, and the other preformed quietly. The type of section that plays depends on what is happening in the game. Done this way, it adds allure and whimsy to the Goose’s actions. If the Goose is stalking, a quieter version of the music will play, if the Goose is on the run or in a chase, then the music switches to a regular version of Minstrels.

The Goose has some essential functions you will use while playing. The most popular control that the Goose has is to honk. It the primary feature of the goose ad you’ll find yourself doing this often. Sometimes (maybe always) out of amusement. The Goose can also run, spread its wings out and lift and lower its head. The Goose can also pick up various items around the village and can carry or drag things around. You can also zoom in and out of the map to see more or less of an area. The Goose can’t fly but can swim and wade in the water. The game designers have done a great job of making it feel like you are controlling a Goose. Although, the only control that I felt that was hardly use was the flapping. There are two maybe three times that this came in handy. The rest of the time, I did this for amusement.

The people in the village don’t seem to be too intimidating. They don’t cause harm to the Goose, but rather shoo The Goose away when nearby or look at it in puzzlement. I had the hardest time with the groundskeeper in the first section of the game. Mostly due to having to get used to the Goose’s controls. It takes a while to get the hang of them, but not to long. You may have issues with this at first as well until you get a feel for the controls. There is no dialogue spoken in the game. You do get to see a speech bubble of an object a person is looking for or notices it out of place — most of the time, when the Goose takes something, and the human goes to put it back or steals an item from The Goose. None of the adults are afraid of the Goose and will outrun The Goose to get the item back. Fortunately, you can hide as the Goose in Various areas. Some of the adults will even give up in a hilarious “awe shucks” style while shaking their fists. The Boy is the only villager who seems to be afraid of The Goose. You can chase him around the street while he runs away from you and even locks him in a phone booth — one of the more amusing moments in the game.

The game is one big area but broken up into five levels. You are given a to-do list for each area. Each section has a certain amount of tasks that you have to complete before you could move on. They aren’t that hard to figure out what to do, but how to do it is tricky. Some are obvious, like getting the groundskeeper wet, but others are less obvious and seem not to make any sense. There is a task in which you have to steal slippers from a man. Getting the first slipper is was easy. You can grab it off of his foot when he is reading a newspaper. To Grab the second slipper, you have to wait until he looks away while drinking tea. It’s strange because he looks more focused when you try to grab the second slipper and not distracted as he was when you first grabbed the slipper. But as soon as he sips the tea, you can grab the other slipper, while his head is still visible like he is paying more attention to the goose. This requires trial and error for most To-do items that you need to cross off your list.

While there are some stealth gameplay elements, the game stealth isn’t that good. That is if you understand the type of stealth that Untitled Goose game wants you to do. Instead of hiding and sneaking around, the game seems to be about hiding or honking in the wide open. Many times you need to get an item from a villager. They could be holding the thing, and you need to get the item from a villager. Maybe you need to grab another thing or run around honking at a villager. The distraction you cause may cause them to drop an item or even see another item out of place and cause them to fix it, causing you to grab whatever you need or to create an action to complete a to-do list item.

***SPOILER WARNING***
The following article contains spoilers from this point on.

There is an end game goal, of sorts. After getting through the four areas, The last level has the Goose going through a small scale version of the town and steal a golden bell from the model tower. You have to make your way back through all of the levels. Avoiding townspeople, you passed to drop your new-found bell in a bell pit at the start of the game. It’s not hard, and you should know how to navigate the Goose and get by the villagers. If the Villagers take the bell from you, you can quickly swipe it back from then. I don’t fully understand the significance of this, but if it makes The Goose happy, I’m ok with this ending. Even after you do this, you can go back to any area that you’d like and complete any tasks that you have remaining on your To-Do list.

***End Spoilers***

The only major downside with the game is that it costs $20. It feels expensive for a game that only has an hour or two of game time. I played this on Xbox Game Pass, so it only cost me what the subscription costs per month at the given moment (Currently $15 a month at the time of this article.) Should this game go on sale or become free, then I’d say pick this game up.

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