![]() ![]() Repeatedly, while playing Untitled Goose Game I found myself saying to those watching: “Imagine a goose doing this?!” And of course we all could. The gleeful havoc a goose can wreak in the provincial context! Peculiar delight is to be had when entering a middle Englander’s fenced domain – the amateur artist who paints at an easel among the ornaments of her garden, or the beslippered man who reads his newspaper in the sun, sucking on a pipe. Some stand up to your antics, shooing you away with mops and flapping arms others cringe and protect their necks, doubled over in fear and dismay. ![]() Despite the children’s colouring-book aesthetic, it all feels so true, and in this way you are forced to consider, like the game’s developers before you, the essence of goose.Ī goose is nothing without a community to bother, and in this dialogue-free world the game’s villagers provide the perfect foils. Witness the magical transition when the goose moves from splashing awkwardly into water to streaking, with sophisticated swiftness, through its surface. When, with the squeeze of a button, the bird puffs out its chest and beats its wings in an effort to intimidate a broom-wielding human opponent, there’s a mixture of animal fury and pitiful inelegance at play. Then again, sometimes being a quintessentially horrible goose requires nothing more than honking loudly and flapping one’s wings at a passerby (then grabbing the terrified child’s glasses after they fall to the ground). What would happen if someone squeaked on the tap just as he was leaning in to get a better look at his carrots? In Untitled Goose Game you must often think like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton: surveying each new scene for its slapstick potential as you seek to fulfil the handful of back-of-a-postcard objectives set by the game’s authors. It would be a shame if someone were to yank the seat away just as he sat down, wouldn’t it? Then there’s the gardener tending his vegetable patch close to an idle sprinkler. Nosing your beak from the leaves of a nearby bush, you’ll notice how every now and again he’ll perch on a nearby stool to rest his legs. There’s the elderly man playing a game of darts in the pub garden. Never before, however, have I felt so appalled by my virtual acts as in Untitled Goose Game, which casts its player as a lone goose on a singular mission to victimise the residents of an English village via a thousand mundane, misery-making ways. ![]() We are used to playing as morally complex individuals in video games even the heroes typically leave a genocidal trail of dead behind them. Yet most of us have a memory, perhaps from childhood, probably involving a plastic bag of stale bread, when we were harangued by one of these quarrelsome birds who had seemingly woken up on the wrong side of the pond. The goose, a water bird with smooth white feathers, a long neck and compressed orange bill, is not an apex predator. ![]()
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