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.


It's a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.

That's what pops up when you start the game, and it's really the best summary of the game. But I should say that while you are a horrible goose, in the grand scheme of things you aren't that bad, and that's the secret of why the game works so well for me. I'm one of those people who can't ever pick the evil dialogue choices or actions in games because I feel too bad about it. I'm normally an achievement completionist, but I won't take the evil route no matter what, and no amount of thinking about how the characters in video games are just collections of data who don't actually have thoughts and feelings will convince me otherwise.

But all of the actions the goose performs are mischievous at best and a moderate inconvenience at worst. In a game like Mass Effect III, a single dialogue choice can not only ruin a single person's life, it can consign an entire species to extinction. In Untitled Goose Game, you throw a farmer's hat into the pond, steal a child's glasses, force a woman to cut a man's prize rosebush, or drop a bucket on a pub bouncer's head. All of these are annoying, certainly, and a hassle to fix, but none of them are life-threatening or even more than an hour's inconvenience. As the goose, I could feel free to cause as much chaos as I wanted to with the knowledge that after the goose left, the town would go back to normal.

The goose can't even hurt the townspeople, which provides part of the difficulty. Approaching them results in them shoeing the goose away and the goose backing off, so tasks involving stealing items they're holding or interacting with requires distraction. That's another reason for the chaos that follows the goose--when thosesocks had to take a particular item that someone was standing near, and when they'd push her away when she got near, she'd start hurling random objects everywhere and honk a bit. When they'd get annoyed and go clean up the mess, she'd be able to accomplish her true goal. Sometimes maximum chaos requires careful planning.


As we played, it quickly became obvious that we had different ideas of how best to accomplish our goals. We summarized them as follows:

Me: "Metal Goose Solid."
thosesocks: "HONK, MOTHERFUCKERS!"

We switched off playing, and during my sections, I would hide behind hedgerows and benches, wait until the townspeople were distracted, and then creep forward and take the object I needed with surgical precision. Meanwhile, thosesocks would run around flapping wildly and honking like a starship bridge alarm, snatching whatever she could lay the goose's beak on and hurling it around with wild abandon. We both accomplished all the goals we set out to, so props to Untitled Goose Game for accommodating our wildly-varied playstyles. The way she played was definitely more in tune with all the memes--"Peace was never an option," etc--and sometimes it made the task much easier. When she went into the high street shop and ransacked it, tossing everything she could off the shelves and dragging the clerk's mop to the other side of the street, she caused enough chaos that she could easily "go shopping" and steal everything she needed for the shopping basket. On the other hand, in the back gardens, I learned the timing of the man's tea-drinking and newspaper-reading so I could consistently sneak by like I was playing Thief. Sometimes thosesocks would try sneaking around, and sometimes I would get annoyed and unleash hell, but mostly we stuck to our respective lanes we had chosen for ourselves.


It's clearly wrong to call playing a honking horrible goose a meditative experience, but I found it to be extremely relaxing. There's no failstate and, at least in the base game, no time pressure. Untitled Goose Game is technically a puzzle game, in that progression to new areas is tied to a list of tasks in each area, but the fun part is mostly in the moment-to-moment interactions with the villagers. Sneaking up behind the shopkeeper and getting into a tug-of-war over her mop, or honking at the goose-traumatized child when walking by him, or taking the various anti-goose signs the villagers construct and hurling them into the river don't have any in-game reward associated with them, but it doesn't matter because they're intrinsically fun. There are too many games that rely entirely on the satisfaction of increasing some bar or checking off an item on a checklist or achievements popping up even when the actual gameplay is mostly very tedious. I mean, I played World of Warcraft for six years and I earned the Insane in the Membrane achievement, so I'm extremely familiar with completing boring tasks all to push through for that final reward. In Untitled Goose Game, when thosesocks was looking around the pub for the way to the next area, she found a package with a letter and we spent a while trying to get the delivery person to take the package, or deliver the mail to the wrong person, or steal the letter and put it in someone else's mail slot, just for the sheer chaos of it all.

All of this is assisted by the design, which is abstract in the extreme while still managing to capture everything important about both the goose and the village. At one point I read an exchange between the developers of the game, where they were talking about how horrible geese are. How a goose only has two colors, white and orange, and how they make a terrible flapping noise when they walk, and how they waddle on land but are graceful in water, and I remembered that the last time we played when thosesocks was ducking () and the goose's head blended seamlessly into its body, leaving it a squat, lurching thing with two beady black eyes staring malevolently out at us. The villagers barely have faces, but their body language indicates all of their surprise, fear, and rage at the horrible goose committing goose crimes in their midst. Everything else is expressed through thought bubbles, which make it easy to determine what object they're focused on at any given time--vital for distracting them with a bit of clutter and then stealing something straight out of their hands.

And then honking at them, because you are a horrible goose.


We were surprised when the game ended, because we had only played a couple hours, but I feel like Untitled Goose Game learned the most important lesson that Portal taught us years ago and that so many games fail to learn--dozens or hundreds of hours of playtime are meaningless if you're just doing dumb repetitive tasks or making pointless numbers go up. I can play Breath of the Wild for hundreds of hours and not get bored, and I can play an RPG like Trails in the Sky or Baldur's Gate II for dozens of hours, but most modern high-budget games greatly overstay their welcome. This game does exactly what it sets out to do in just the right amount of time, and because of that, we never got the urge that so many games instill to just forge through to the end and ignore everything off the main path. It was actually kind of sad when the game ended, and I think we're going to try to do some of the hidden objectives that we missed on our first time through.

I expected dumb memes and...well, I did get some of those, but especially as a co-op gaming experience, Untitled Goose Game is worth the hype. If you have a friend who likes games--or even is conversant in games, since thosesocks rarely plays video games--sit down with them, load up the game, and embrace the lovely day and the horrible goose there to ruin it.