I’m glad to report that despite playing Warhammer Online now, it’s not all I do – I must’ve learned something form my WoW excesses. Or not, who knows. Anyway – I’ll stick with my review structure here, fasten your seatbelts. It’s another awesome game (just like TF2, albeit in a completely different way), reviewing those just tempts me more I guess.

World of Goo

The game we’re looking at is World of Goo, created by the independent developer 2D Boy. It’s out since October 13th, was available on Steam but isn’t anymore in Europe due to some contract confusion – but you can still buy it directly from 2D Boy. I preordered mine from there, and it went entirely smooth.

Oh, something of note: The game comes without DRM! From the mail I got that told me my preorder copy was ready:

World of Goo has absolutely no copy protection or DRM at all, since we want to give you (and everyone) the best experience we can. Thanks for not distributing this, and helping us make this possible!

This means that I’d have bought the game even if it’d have been less great Too rigid DRM has the effect of not letting me buy it, last time that happened was with the Spore I was looking forward to so much

Graphics:

The graphics are utterly cute and charming, perfect for a casual game like this.

Miss World of Goo

Every level has a unique style, the goo balls have a quirky personality and hop around, the backgrounds and level overviews are marvellous. Each chapter has a distinct style, too, four of the five are seasonal and the fifth … is a secret.

Sunset with Goo Balls

The reason why you don’t see five stars here is because the (fixed) resolution they chose is merely 800×600 – while actually playing the pixels don’t bother that much really, but it’s not perfect, and only perfect gets 5 stars.

A nice touch is that the low resolution kinda reminds of those retro classics we all love so much…

Sound:

The only nitpick I have here is that the tracks are rather short (about a minute each) – there’s plenty of them (although they do repeat towards the end), and they greatly support the gameplay and feel of the levels as well. The goo balls make cute little “plop” or chattering noises whenever you pick them up, or drop them, or fling them, or whatever else you can do with them.

Gameplay:

The goal couldn’t be simpler in principle: Guide the goo balls to the exit, collect as many of them as you can by building close to the exit pipe and letting them jump out. The first level has a great sign showing how to do things:

First Level

That’s all the instructions you’ll ever need. Well, and the time trackback feature, another such shield.

The complexity doesn’t come from an overly complicated user interface, but from the different types of goo, and the levels themselves. Whenever you start thinking you might get bored by what you’re currently doing soon, there’s a new level with an entirely new challenge, new types of goo, new ways in which they stick to each other, new ways of interacting with them, and new obstacles to overcome.

But the changes are introduced so carefully that you barely notice you’re playing an entirely different game, it feels totally the same although you’re not using the same mechanics nor components anymore…

Different Way of Doing Things

Some of the levels really are positively hard. For one, I even had to cheat and look it up in their forums.

If you’re bored in the end after all, you can always ramp up the difficulty by trying to get OCD flags for the levels (Obsessive Completion Distinction Criteria) – those require you to finish the level faster, or bring more goo balls to the pipe, or only use a select number of turns.

Fun:

Oh, as if I hadn’t mentioned “fun” enough by now. This game is the most fun game I’ve played in years, period. With some social criticism and dark humour thrown in, of course. The learning and motivation curve are just perfect – you really see that these developers have something so many titles lack these days: Love for their game.

The game isn’t really meant to be one that wastes your time for years and years, like MMOs or online shooters are, so longevity is less of a criterion. Nevertheless, the OCD help there as well, and going back to earlier levels after more experience in more complicated ones is a rewarding experience. Additionally, the game is entirely a puzzler but nevertheless has a story worth of note.

And there’s always the World of Goo Corporation’s tower building minigame to keep you interested after you finished the levels, I had the 25th-highest tower worldwide for a few seconds. Too bad I had built the top bits a wee bit unstable and it crashed horribly.

Overall:

I was very, very tempted to give 5 stars, but the game does have some shortcomings. Since everything else is totally awesome, and it’s easy to find reviews that list what’s good, I’ll list those shortcomings here:

• There are some remaining bugs – I had a two or three crashes. One of them actually deleted my entire profile as well, so I had to start from scratch – luckily, that happened shortly after I reached Chapter 2 for the first time only.
• The music does get a bit repetitive – not because the tracks themselves wouldn’t be great, but because they’re so short.
• The game overall is somewhat short, although Ron Carmel (one of the devs) was probably right when he said that “Beyond the moon chapter in the European version, there will be no extra content. I think we’ve reached the point with this game where more is not better.”

But keep in mind that the game only costs $20, and is from a studio that consists of two people. And has no DRM. Before that background, I should maybe give the fifth star after all (but I won’t, can somebody bind my hand on my back please?)…

Anyway: Go buy it, now! This game finishes the discussion whether games can be art, simply by being art.

Update 2008-10-15 15:24: Gee, if you’re not convinced, there’s a demo now (the entire first chapter), via Rock Paper Shotgun. And you seem to be able to change the resolution with a little hack, although it didn’t quite work for my 1280×1024 (1024×768 went fine though).