Listen to the Rain

When I first heard of Untitled Goose Game, I didn't get any of hype. I figured that it would be a flash-in-the-pan dumb meme game like Goat Simulator or Octodad, where a deliberately-overtuned physics engine leads to ridiculous antics, good for watching on Twitch while you scroll through Twitter on your phone but not actually interesting to play for more than ten minutes, so I stopped paying any attention to it other than seeing people mention it occasionally or the articles that the gaming sites I read posted. And then it came out and all of a sudden the memes were everywhere. Friends whose taste I trusted were posting them and talking about how much they loved playing the game. People were changing their profile photos to the goose. Well-known memes like Smudge the Cat came out in Untitled Goose versions. The goose was, if you'll excuse the phrase, in the air.

In the midst of all this, thosesocks messaged me one afternoon and told me that the previous night, she had gone to a party and had ducked into a side room where people were playing Untitled Goose Game. She had a bunch of fun with the playing-in-a-group format, and so she asked me if I had a Switch and, when I said yes, asked if I wanted to play Untitled Goose Game game with her because she could use some stress-relieving goose antics. She offered to buy me dinner to reimburse me for the cost of the game, I accepted, and so while we chatted and ate dinner, the game downloaded, and then we booted it up and started to play.

My initial impressions of the game were totally wrong. It's just as great as the awards and memes say it is.


( Read more... )