Allison Weiss

Game Designer & Artist

Untitled Goose Game with a Grain of Salt

In real life, I live in almost constant fear of birds messing with me, flying towards my face, pooping on me from above, etc. But in Untitled Goose Game, I AM the bird and I want to mess with everyone in increasingly amusing ways.

First Impressions

The game greets you with such a gentle calmness, the carefree piano gives some solid British Bake Off vibes. The fact that you are going to spend the game causing general chaos falls nicely against the calm backdrop. Makes everything feel like, “Oh, look I’m a cute little goose. I wonder what harmless hijinks I’ll get up to next!” And then the tasks you undertake can range from gathering items to scaring and herding a young boy into a phonebooth, trapping him. You can turn neighbor against neighbor, take over the airwaves, and have a nice picnic, to boot. Untitled Goose Game is a lot like a picnic, it’s all laid out in front of you and it’s up to you how you go about digging in.

Things I wasn’t crazy about…

Handling

Running around at top speed can be kind of “loose-y goose-y” (I honestly could not stop myself). It can feel tricky to run at top speeds and be unable to turn adequately without slowing down. Though the intention is probably to get the player to get a feel for strategic braking, the switch from high to low speed doesn’t ease in such a way that makes the transition feel good enough to try often.


The Camera

Now this is my most major pet peeve with Untitled Goose Game, especially in the initial garden stage and the neighboring backyard area. In these two locations, stealth can be required to pull off certain plans, like stealing the lady neighbor’s laundry from the clothesline and throwing it in her neighbor’s fountain. You need to sneak by him, but more than once I found it difficult to evade his gaze because the camera had zoomed in on me automatically. I couldn’t see him, but he could see me.

The zooming in and out can get tricky, as it seems to be based on your location in the map. If you are right on the line between the zoom out area and the zoom in area, the camera can wind up struggling between the two and causing an unnerving shaky cam effect. And the lack of control over the camera angle, though nicely contributing to the level design and aesthetic, gets frustrating when there are multiple areas that hide the goose itself from view. Being able to adjust the camera angle, even to preset views, would be preferable to struggling with blindspots like those I’ve run into.

What I absolutely loved…

Figuring it out

Untitled Goose Game throws you right in and gives you all the tools you are ever going to need: how to move, how to honk, how to grab things with your beak, how to flap your wings, and how to lower your head. Besides controls, you are given a to-do list with a set of tasks (and a secret “more things to-do” list!). I personally love games like this with a simple concept where the fun and variety comes from interacting with your surroundings.

But that is all that they give you for free. To play and progress, you have to do the rest by figuring out how to accomplish the tasks on your list. Though some are straightforward, like “Rake in a Lake”, others leave room for interpretation and scheming, like “Get the gardener wet” or “Get in the pub”. With the latter task, I and a friend of mine performed very differently. I, as usual, steamrolled my way in by overwhelming the people guarding the pub entrance and repeatedly untying their shoelaces and forcing myself far enough in that they’d be unable to kick and shoo me away. My friend, being a more up-to-par gamer, hid himself in a large box (to which we both started shouting Metal Gear references) and was carried in by one of the pub employees, thus sneaking in undetected.

The Piano Music

This music, man, I just love it. After a couple of days, I could literally hear it in my mind as I fell to sleep.

The music contributes a lot of the calm and whimsy that comes through in the game’s atmosphere. The fact that it is responsive to your actions and the actions of the people around you conveys the general mood as well as the tension of the interaction. It gets fast and loud when someone is chasing close after you, it gets slow and quiet to match up your footsteps as you slowly sneak by, and there’s a big loud resolution when you complete a significant task.

My Favorite Moment

There comes a point where you must walk through someone’s home to progress. Now, you do not really get to see the interior of the house, or where you are inside it. But trying to move in any direction while inside the house will do the same general thing: lead you to the exit, and knock down whatever shit that’s in the house that lay in your path. As such, you are staring at the exterior as you hear the stranger’s possessions crash and shatter, you are filled with the joy that comes from the simultaneous silliness and reality that this is exactly what would happen if a goose got into a person’s house. 

The Rest of my Notes…

  • The art style: I absolutely love the simple figures and the bright colors. It gives a lot of life to the small town scenery.
  • Wreaking havoc on tiny town: Messing with the village of miniature made me feel like goose-zilla and it was awesome
  • The glass bottle on the beak: This interaction was so funny to me and I don’t know why. The little touches to add humor and charm to even the smallest interaction is something special in Untitled Goose Game.
  • It can be completed in FOUR MINUTES: I cannot do this, at all, but speedrunner Seji was able to do so by physics glitching through fences.
  • Forgetful/Scatterbrained villagers: I found myself waiting for the villagers to put items back that I just took, so that they’d forget about me and go on with their business more than once.
  • Clumsy/Looping actions: The lady neighbor in particular would get stuck in a loop where she would try to close up the hole in the shared fence, it would fall down before she fastened it, and she would try again. Over and over until I distracted her again. Was not a game breaking instance, but a prime example of the issue.
  • The opening menu UI: I love it, and I want to steal it. The simple aesthetic matches that of the game. In particular I like the save files selection screen. The journals reflect both the idea of recording your progress, and the to-do lists in-game that are written on journal paper. The little rubber eraser is also a cute touch as the file save clear.