GDC 08: World of Goo

I think I would suck, very hard, at World of Goo. I’m not particularly good at engineering, and I have trouble wrapping my head around puzzle games.

That doesn’t make me want to buy it any less, though.

World of Goo, winner of the Technical Excellence and Design Innovation awards at this year’s IGF, is a puzzle/construction game where players must build huge towers or bridges or whathaveyou using little quasi-sentient globs of goo.

If it sounds weird, it is. If the above video makes it look interesting, it also is. Hit the jump for more. 

This should have been a hands-on impressions post. I went to the IGF booth on the GDC show floor with the express intention of playing World of Goo, only to find that a woman was already playing it. “No worries,” I thought. “I’ll just wait. I’ve got a whole hour until my interview with Kevin Bruner.”

This bitch played for forty-five fucking minutes straight. She died, and reloaded. And died, and reloaded. And completely ignored everyone around her. Still, she was doing better than I would have done, and I learned a lot about the game from watching her play. I also learned a lot about my ability to hate the human race, but that’s for another day.

World of Goo is basically a much more substantial sequel to Tower of Goo, which is currently available for free. But where Tower challenged players to build a Goo tower as high as humanly possible, World includes deliberately-designed levels which force players to build their Goo towers or bridges in interesting and unusual ways. One level required players to build a horizontal bridge across a vast chasm, while another (far more interesting) had the player building a Goo ladder to escape a huge monster’s belly. 

The physics are the game’s main attraction, as the individual Goo blobs create bouncy connections between other goo blobs, moving and contorting depending on how much stress is applied to different parts of the Goo chain. The Goo structures move with a remarkable fluidity and realism that made me really begin to appreciate just why the developers won the technology award this week. When you combine a wonderfully robust, clever physics engine with some equally clever level design, you get a really unique experience.

Since the game is so realistic, though, this means two things: it looks really damned difficult, and really slow-paced. I do not, however, mean these as insults. World of Goo seems difficult and thoughtful in the same way LEGO blocks are; it takes a very special degree of effort and thoughtfulness to make what you want to make really well, but this ultimately makes the final product much more satisfying. It also means that, since the game requires such internal deliberation, it can be tedious to watch.

Especially if you’re playing it for forty-five fucking minutes straight on a show floor.

God, what a bitch.