CHENNAI : Living a day off a checklist is not simple. Most days, things don’t work the way you expect it to — the unpleasant realities of life keep you away from achieving max productivity. Sometimes the reason for the unpleasantness can be a goose. A goose with a checklist. A checklist with items intended to annoy humans. ‘What are you on about, Anusha?’ you might think.
‘Is this about another one of those goat simulator type useless games that we’ll never play?’. You might never play the ‘Untitled Goose Game’ (UGG). The game will play you, by making you think of the most ludicrous, creative ways to solve a problem. A lovely day in a quiet (and very aesthetic) English village needs to be disrupted –— through a single goose’s honking, wing flapping, stealthy movements, and item picking. Stealthy movement is key to success (considering that this game is self-proclaimed stealth genre). Hiding in bushes, pretending to be a goose statue, noisy distractions — all these creative tactics work in UGG.
The game starts with getting you to understand the lay of the land — there are certain things the goose can do, certain items that you can interact with and some that are off limits. Goose cannot overpower humans; if they understand what goose is up to, they shoo goose away. The best part of UGG is that it lacks the anxiety associated with failure in any videogame.
The cause for typical anxiety is two-fold — losing progress and second, restarting missions from scratch (due to death of character in most cases). In UGG, the game is saved automatically and continuously — so you never lose your progress.
The repercussions of failing a mission, or in this case — a prank, is very insignificant. The worst that could happen is that the human plucks the items away from the goose’s beak and shoos away. UGG is entertaining to the viewers too —– you don’t have to be playing the game to enjoy the fun. The game is a playable children’s cartoon, with every prank as an individual episode. In UGG, I see great potential for meme content and cult status — rating the game Goose/5 for healthy and wholesome entertainment.