Just a quick post about World of Goo.
World of Goo is a physics puzzle game written and designed by Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel. They released the first of five worlds as a sort of pre-order bonus which Sarah got me for my birthday last year.
World of Goo helped inspire me to get off my duff and write a game. It is one of the games in the ‘other awesome games’ section of the Fantastic Contraption credits.
The first world was great and remains almost completely unchanged. So it’s still great.
The new stuff is… wonderous. The art and story in World of Goo is just crazy compelling. It is well worth playing through just for visuals. World 4 is especially just mind-blowing. I also strongly urge you not to read any more about World of Goo before you buy and start playing it (available to the non-pre-ordering world on Oct 13 ’08). Go in blind so the surprises will the surprising and the unexpected will be unexpected.
They did this thing that I’ve been really liking from game developers lately. They make the game short and packed with goodness. I probably got 4 or 5 hours out of it (although with the time I spent playing and re-playing the first world I was well prepared for all but the last few levels).
So instead of spending half my time grinding through stuff or replaying the same level with a slight variation World of Goo gave me 5 hours of solid new puzzles and kept re-creating itself artistically. So instead of 10 hours of o.k. gameplay I got 5 hours of great gameplay. Which I can always replay, there are a miriad of personal challenges I set myself in each World of Goo level.
Although in this gush of puzzle and game-play ideas there were a few levels I didn’t love. There are a few levels that deviate from the very-fun goo-structure building idea and went for the not-as-fun stacking blocks idea. But these were in the overwhelming majority.
So World of Goo: super fun, go play it.
