Tag Archives: PC game

PN Video Game Review: Untitled Goose Game

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[Image courtesy of USG.]

A game review? We know, it’s been a long time. Yes, we often discuss the puzzly aspects of video games both new and old, but it’s rare that we review them.

Thankfully, friend of the blog Jennifer Cunningham — puzzler, artist, musicologist, and former Tabletop Tournament Champion — offered to step up and review a puzzle game as clever as it is subversive, one that’s already made quite an impression across social media.

So, without further ado, let’s turn things over to Jen for her take on Untitled Goose Game.

On September 23rd, 2019, a new video game release took the Internet by storm.

Untitled Goose Game, an independent stealth and puzzle game from House House, has a straightforward description: It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.

That’s it. That’s the tagline. And yet it has already won the hearts (and memes) of many.

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[Image courtesy of Polygon.]

Yes, players take on the role of a rogue goose, being mischievous and causing mayhem in a quiet English village. The objective of the game is to complete a series of tasks to advance to the next area of the town. Players are given very simple abilities as the goose: you can waddle and run, you can grab and pick up items with your beak, you can honk, you can duck (pun not intended), and you can flap your wings.

With these skills, players must determine how to complete their “To Do List” tasks, while avoiding being thwarted or chased away by the village’s (perhaps justifiably) irate citizens. Such tasks include “get into the garden,” “break the broom,” and “be awarded a flower.”

Unlike many video games, there are no hints given to players such as flashing or highlighted items, arrows, dialog, etc., so players must experiment and problem-solve in order to accomplish the vaguely-described tasks.

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[Image courtesy of Goose Game.]

Since there is no life system and no time limits, players are free to explore the world and see what sticks. Sneaking around, hiding objects, and sometimes deliberately calling attention to your goose-self are required to succeed. It is completely up to the player to figure out how to approach each endeavor. Additionally, players will discover some hidden tasks as they experiment and try to solve each task’s unique puzzle.

Untitled Goose Game is fun, farcical, and highly entertaining. It will make you think, laugh, and almost wish you were a rebellious goose yourself. But a word of warning: it is a relatively quick game. Players can easily win the entire game in just a few hours.

While there are bonus tasks that open up after winning, there isn’t must incentive to replay the game over and over unless you’re determined to beat your own personal timed record. We can only hope that the developers come up with a sequel or expanded gameplay in the future.

Untitled Goose Game is available for digital purchase in the Nintendo Switch Store and for PC/Mac at Epic Games.

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[Image courtesy of EuroGame.net.]

Ratings for Untitled Goose Game:

  • Enjoyability: 4/5 — This game provides a high level of entertainment despite the limited world. You truly feel as one with the goose. The varying difficulty of tasks is well balanced to allow players of all puzzle-solving abilities to accomplish the game’s objectives.
  • Puzzle incorporation: 4/5 — Completing tasks requires the player to determine how to use your basic goose skills to achieve them with no clear directive on how to accomplish them. Prepare for a lot of trial-and-error. It is truly a problem-solving puzzle game.
  • Graphics: 3/5 — Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is an indie game so the graphics are not on par with most PC/Switch video games or franchises. The graphics are somewhat flat, similar to paper cutouts. But at the same time, that is part of the game’s charm (much like its non-title title) and detail is certainly not lacking. The colors are muted but calming, the world is crisp and clean, and movement is smooth.
  • Gameplay: 4/5 — The drive to sow a little chaos lives within all of us, and this game lets us play out that devious urge in perhaps the most innocent way while challenging players with puzzly goodness. If you’re going to cause trouble, might as well be a cute goose just doing its goose thing. The satisfaction that comes with completing a task is extremely gratifying, as is the sandbox-esque freedom of being able to cause mayhem for no honkin’ reason at all.

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To Solve This Murder Mystery, You Need to Break the Game

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[Image courtesy of Game Informer.]

Our readership isn’t a predominantly video game-savvy audience. We have lots of app users and lots of pencil-and-paper solvers in the PuzzleNation membership, but fewer gamers.

So you may wonder why I periodically write about video games when it’s a niche interest for the majority of our readers. That’s an entirely fair question.

As a puzzle enthusiast, I’m constantly seeking out new ways to build puzzles and solve them. Brain teasers, word problems, riddles, and mechanical puzzles all fit under the umbrella of “puzzles,” but they’re all very different solving experiences. Similarly, there’s a huge difference between a pencil-and-paper puzzle and an escape room, a murder mystery and a scavenger hunt, an encrypted message and a puzzle box.

But they’re all puzzles. And that’s what I find so fascinating. There are endless ways to challenge ourselves in puzzly fashion, and video games are constantly innovating when it comes to puzzle-solving.

[Image courtesy of Zelda Dungeons.]

Whether we’re talking about navigating past guards with well-placed arrow shots in the Thief games, navigating the labyrinth of the Water Temple in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or maneuvering around a room in mind-bending ways with your portal gun in Portal, video games can take 2D puzzle ideas and bring them into the third dimension in amazing ways.

A friend recently told me about a game called Iris Fall, where you actually manipulate light and shadows in order to solve puzzles. That’s not just ingenious, it’s beautiful as well.

There are even games that let you change the rules of the puzzle itself in order to solve it.

[Image courtesy of Born Frustrated Studio.]

And another game in that vein recently came to market, a detective game called File://maniac.

In this murder mystery, you’re tasked with tracking down a devious murderer who happily taunts you with messages as you pursue them. But instead of pursuing leads and accomplishing tasks in more traditional detective-game format, you actually have to manipulate the files of the game itself as you play.

Yes, the very coding and organization of the game is the basis of the puzzles and codes for you to unravel.

Heather Alexandra at Kotaku explains more:

Getting rid of a locked door might require placing the door’s files in your recycling bin. Finding the password to a lock means opening up a handful of notebook files and searching until you find the code. It’s a different sort of puzzle solving, one that encourages the player to be aware of the game world’s artificiality… playing around with the actual game files creates a fun mixture of puzzling and “exploration” as you poke around folders and directories.

[Image courtesy of Go Go Free Games.]

It’s a brilliantly meta concept. Whereas many games and puzzle experiences are all about immersion, ensuring you forget you’re playing a game and encouraging you to dive into the narrative and gameplay itself, File://maniac demands that you not only remember you’re playing a game, but forces you to think like the designers of the game to circumvent each challenge.

It’s like being trapped in a maze, then being able to shift your perspective to an overhead view of the maze and navigate yourself out with omniscient ease. It’s a total perspective shift, and the a-ha moment of figuring out how to change the rules to your advantage is an immensely satisfying reward.

Do you know of any games out there that create unique and unexpected puzzly experiences? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you!

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A Logic Puzzle Mystery, Brought to Life!

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Halloween might be over and done with, but there’s still plenty of spooky puzzling to be found if you know where to look.

For instance, if you’re looking for a game that takes the traditional logic puzzle in a new direction, let’s talk about Return of the Obra Dinn, a PC game that has received some rave reviews recently.

In 1802, the merchant ship “Obra Dinn” set out from London for the Orient with over 200 tons of trade goods. Six months later it hadn’t met its rendezvous point at the Cape of Good Hope and was declared lost at sea.

Early this morning of October 14th, 1807, the Obra Dinn drifted into port with sails damaged and no visible crew. As insurance adjustor for the East India Company’s London Office, find means to board the ship and recover the Crew Muster Roll book for assessment.

With that intense historical premise to work with, you know you’re in for a few scares and some sinister storytelling.

So the game centers around a first-person perspective of this ship as you explore what happened to the crew. You’re armed with two items: a book that contains the ship’s manifest and other documents, and a pocketwatch that, when worn near a corpse, magically reveals what happened at the moment of the character’s death.

The book works like a standard logic problem’s puzzle grid, where you can fill in the information you know and deduce, say, the last names of five people in a marching band, their ages, and what instrument they play. Except, in the case of the Obra Dinn, instead of the details of a fictional marching band, you need to uncover the identity of every person on the ship, how they died, and who killed them.

The pocketwatch sequences are the centerpiece of the puzzle, giving you a static scene of the moment of death, the characters frozen in place, along with the sounds and dialogue that accompanied the person’s demise. You can walk around the frozen scene and examine details, using the book to help document what you discover and slowly eliminate possibilities from the list.

It’s a bit like a scene from Sherlock or Hannibal, as you play the detective walking through the death scene, trying to tease out the key information lurking within.

So the book is both a solving tool and the main body of the puzzle itself, a place for storing information, making guesses, and confirming when you have the correct chain of events for a given character’s death.

The Obra Dinn is one giant, interconnected puzzle, built out of many little moments like this, and only when you’ve taken the time to examine all of it, exploring the ship and the crew from all angles, can you fill in the story of what happened.

It’s essentially a murder mystery novel, but only the first chapter and the finale are in place; it is up to you as you piece together disparate fragments and assemble the narrative. In the end, it’s a simple story, but one told backward, forward, and out of order.

Return of the Obra Dinn is the kind of storytelling that takes puzzles off the page and plants them smack-dab in the center of your imagination. And that’s pretty cool.

If you’d like to try out the game for yourself, Return of the Obra Dinn is out now on PC and macOS for $19.99.

[For more information, check out these reviews from Kotaku and Screen Rant, as well as the creator’s homepage.]

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!