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Review: World of Goo 2

Usually it’s Josh Bycer who does these reviews of new games, but for a change I’m doing one this time! And in text no less! It’s World of Goo 2, which is available for purchase now on the Epic Store, Switch and the makers’ own website.

The people from Tomorrow Corporation got in touch out of the blue, because then-Gamasutra helped spread the word about the original game long ago. Now-Game-Developer currently has a temporary hold on freelance Q&A work, but Kyle Gray was gracious enough to give me a press key anyway, and I figured a review here would be the least I could do. It’s true, it was a free key, but on the other hand I’ve always been a big fan of the original World of Goo. I’ve finished it at least twice, on PC and on Wii.

Does this make me biased? What does biased even mean? The principals of 2DBOY and Tomorrow Corporation have always been shining stars of indie gaming, and I’ve played nearly everything they’ve made since, including the DS title Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure, directed by Kyle Gray. Was there a chance that this could have been a negative review? Not really, but then, if it was going to be negative, I probably wouldn’t be writing it. All I can do is assure you: we’re not in this for press keys.

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There are games that feel like they’ve been with us always, and so it seems for the original World of Goo. It was published in 2008, but I’m so used to games being older than I expect that I half expected it to date from 2006, or earlier.

2DBOY’s World of Goo came out at the beginning of the indie gaming revolution, and one was of the biggest success stories of that heady time. It was one of the first non-Nintendo downloadable titles for the Wii, where it was a huge hit and helped to establish that console, and Nintendo’s consoles generally, as a hospitable, profitable home for small independently-made games.

In the 16 years since, the game industry has changed drastically, although really it always has been. Indie titles have proliferated, to the degree that it has become difficult for a game to make itself seen amidst a flood of competitors. Some of the principals of 2DBOY split off into another company, Tomorrow Corporation, which produced the quasi-spinoff Little Inferno, a couple of brilliant visual programming games, Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans, and they published the comedy-adventure game The Captain. Except for The Captain, all of these Tomorrow-made titles, and World of Goo too, share a distinctive and unique visual style and soundscape, which are kind of like if Tim Burton and Danny Elfman decided to make video games.

But World of Goo was the game that started it all. It’s a clever physics game where players build constructions out of “Goo Balls” in order to erect towers, bridge gaps, and generally bring the remaining balls on the level to an exit pipe. Drag one goo ball near another to make a bond between them, which behaves like a thin, stiff spring. By joining them together, balls and bonds, you can make all kinds of physics constructions. More species of goo balls are introduced in later levels: goo balloons, reusable goo, goo that can bond to three other goo balls at once, goo that can only bond singly, goo that sticks to walls and more.

The aim of most levels is to reach that pipe somewhere in the level. If you can get a goo construction close enough to it, it activates, drawing goo balls into it. To win a level, you have to collect a minimum number of balls; getting more means getting a better score. Usually goo balls that have been used to build things can’t then be sucked down the pipe, so the more goo you use to reach it, the less you can save and the lower your score. Each level has an optional “OCD,” or “Obsessive Completion Distinction” target, that is reached is marked on the hub screen by a flag. Some levels it’s earned by saving a target number of goo balls, some by using under a certain number of moves (goo connections), and with some it’s just a time limit. All of this applies to its sequel, World of Goo 2, as well, just with more kinds of goo and with more puzzle elements. The OCD goals now have one of each type for each level, which are tracked separately.

World of Goo’s gameplay is not completely original. A variety of small games and web toys featuring physics systems of WoG’s type have existed at least as far back as the year 2000, going back to Soda’s defunct, yet fondly remembered Java toy Soda Constructor. World of Goo itself began life as a freeware toy called Tower of Goo, that emerged from its creators’ work at Carnegie University and the Expermental Gameplay Project. (Warning: link is ancient, although still works.)

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World of Goo went far beyond those earlier versions of the idea, and World of Goo 2 goes beyond even that. The games stay fresh through by constantly introducing new wrinkles on the concept, and new kinds of goo balls with different properties, and it’s always a joy to get a new element to play with. The first game had 48 levels, and WoG2 has 61, but they go by in a flash, and the game never overstays its welcome. If anything they feel much too short, like there are gameplay possibilities left unexplored. I guess it’s true that you should always leave them wanting more.

World of Goo had a bizarre story involving the creation and machinations of an ominous company, called World of Goo Corporation, that may have been inspired by 2DBOY’s founders’ experiences working for Electronic Arts. It’s really less of a story as a collection of short stories, told in five chapters, with the highlight being a bizarre and self-referential Chapter 4 where the game’s concepts are flipped upside down.

World of Goo 2 also has a bizarre story that’s like a collection of short stories, about World of Goo Corporation’s ominous successor, World of Goo Organization. It all culminates in Chapter 4, where the game’s concepts aren’t so much flipped upside down but entirely stretched out of shape. I don’t want to spoil it, but Chapter 4 is amazing.

So yes, World of Goo 2 largely follows the same lines as the predecessor. It’s not just in story. It follows up on some of those possibilities hinted at during World of Goo, but it also adds many more new concepts, so by the end, which I reached in an obsessed 9 1/2 hours of play, I felt like there were at least as many gameplay loose ends as at the end of the first World of Goo.

All the old species of goo ball return, but now there’s new friends to learn about. There’s now liquids! And jelly creatures that you can split apart and grind up in satisfying ways! Goo conduits and launchers, and shooters and engines, and even more beyond that. The physics engine has received a substantial upgrade. Goo balls now leave damp blotches on the terrain they rest upon. The Time Bug undo feature can go back a bit further. You can drag the view around with the mouse, zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, and the goo balls are a bit better about getting out of your way when you’re trying to click on something important.

The only way that it’s really deficient, I’d say, is that it lacks the open-ended “Tower of Goo” mode of the original, where players could use their collected goo balls from the other levels in a high score challenge. Maybe in an update? World of Goo 2 has enough ideas in it that they could, if they chose, make a World of Goo 3. But what then? Could they keep riding this train for 100,000 years? Maybe not, but if they can keep up this level of ingenuity, then easily for another sequel.

World of Goo 2 has an engaging art style, so here, have some of the many hundreds of screenshots I took. There aren’t any big spoilers in them, but they do illustrate some of the later goos and gimmicks.

Lava, and goo bonds that deform to terrain

I had an amazing amount of fun with World of Goo 2. I binged it and finished it in 9 1/2 hours. You might finish it a bit faster, since I took something of the scenic route, but I also still remember many tricks from the first game, which I had completely OCD’d on Wii, and didn’t get stuck anywhere. It gets started a bit faster than World of Goo did. If you haven’t played it, you might want to go through it first. Luckily World of Goo has never gone out of print, and is available for nearly all desktop and mobile platforms, in addition to Nintendo consoles. You can’t get the Wii or Wii-U versions any more, but it can be obtained readily for the Switch.

It’s true, I’m on Tomorrow Corporation’s side. They’re good people and deserve to do well, but I’d be obsessing over World of Goo 2 even if I’d never heard of them before. It’s a real jewel, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

If you found this review useful, please pass it around. And let us know; maybe I’ll do more text reviews in the future.

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Nintendo Direct 2/21/24 Quick Takes

Here is the whole video in case you missed it:

Here is the list, with personal hype level expressed in stars, none to five:

00:30 – Grounded. Your characters are “shruken at the hands of an evil corporation.” First, corporations don’t have hands, their employees do. Second, it’s interesting to see how corporations have joined mad scientists, sorcerers and alien emperors as “the evil.” Anyway, this looks mostly like Generic Action-Adventure Game. “Work your way through the campaign to uncover the mysteries of the back yard.” Like, where they buried the water pipe? Good luck with that. Two stars.

01:37 – ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the mist. Big contrast to the previous trailer. It’s a “return to the Ender Lily’s world,” just assuming you know what that is. From the trailer I assume the “Ender Lily” must be a really bad flower, because everything is dark and grim, but especially dark. “This once flourishing country sits atop a wealth of buried magic,” yet somehow it looks like Blade Runner. Points for using the word homunculi (16 points if you have the tiles for it) and not inventing another bullshit video game word like “the Aeinsward,” or “the Valarath” or some crap like that. Your character is told early on that “your eyes says[sic] that you long for death.” Sometimes the winning move is not to play. I feel bad about talking down the work of so many hard-working developers, but I don’t think it’s possible to make a game less appealing to me, personally. One star.

03:04 – Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure. “Role-puzzling” is not a thing. Looks like it might be okay, but I’m rating my enthusiasm as generated by the trailers, and they give me flashbacks to the PULL word in Baba Is You, so: Two stars.

03:45 – Unicorn Overlord. Oh, I want to play the fantasy title game too! Gargoyle Emperor! Chimera General! Minotaur President! Looks to me like a Vanillaware joint. Checking: I was right. Reading the transcript, I’m struck by the word unleash, one of those overused videogame words. It literally means to let go, but because it sounds good it gets used for all kinds of things. But really, if it ain’t a dog, it doesn’t fit. Vanillaware’s cool though, so I’ve talked myself into looking forward to it. Three stars.

04:23 – Monster Hunter Stories. “Monster Hunter” brings to mind fighting dragons and behemoths. “Stories” suggests Scenes From A Marriage. Combined, I’m imaging getting hitched to Smaug. (This is probably the backstory to the classic anime Dragon Half, come to think of it.) Anyway, it’s Monster Hunter. You hunt monsters. It’s a remake of a 3DS game, discarding the (mostly) realistic look of other Monster Hunter games for cartoony human characters. I have a previous Monster Hunter on my shelf but I’ve never played it, so I can only rate this One star.

05:00 – Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed. I remember when Epic Mickey games filled the discount bins at Walmart, but I always liked the idea, and the internet-viral concept art that inspired them, and they were “directed” by Warren Spector. One thing that always confused me about Epic Mickey, of which the trailer reminds me, is the opening positions Mickey as an innocent interloper, but the content of the Epic Mickey games clearly indicate that these worlds are about him, as a character. He’s not a plucky underdog, he’s the center of the Disney-pocalypse. And yet, that’s interesting. Three stars.

06:07 – Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. The title logo makes it look like it’s called Shin Megami Tensei V: Engeance. This being a remake, I’m just glad they didn’t call it something like Revengance, hah wouldn’t that be stupid. I don’t remember at this point whether a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game has ever appeared in English before. Maybe on the Playstation or Playstation 2? Sounds about right. (Checking: it was recent! 2021! Huh.) I think it defies belief that this isn’t yet another Persona game. Two stars.

07:41 – STAR WARS: Battlefront Classic Collection. Okay I was wrong, it’s not possible for me to be less interested in this. It’s exciting to some people or else they wouldn’t have made this, but I’m writing this, and I say, One star.

08:24 – SOUTH PARK: SNOW DAY! When your franchise stars a character who was once grounded by his mother for “trying to exterminate the Jews,” I submit that there is something deeply wrong with it. No stars.

There’s so many games here that I’m going to skip around a bit from here on.

10:23 – Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble. It’s an article of faith now that there have been no good Monkey Ball games since Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, and the recent Banana Mania, which was primarily content recycled from the old games. I just picked up Banana Mania a couple of days ago and was reminded why I like the Gamecube-era titles so much, so what the hell, Three stars.

11:40 – World of Goo 2. World of Goo was beloved of many people, myself included, and I’ve also liked everything Tomorrow Corporation has done, so I’m really looking forward to this, even if World of Goo is a very hard act to follow. Five stars.

14:03 – Another Crab’s Treasure.That’s a great title. The trailer, itself, actually calls this game a soulslike, which I guess is just the word we use now when a game is meant to be hard. The game does fix my main issue with Souls games, their relentless dourness. It’s whimsical and charming! Three stars.

15:32 – Penny’s Big Breakaway. From some of the people who made Sonic Mania, which itself makes it worthy of examination. A 3D platformer in 2024 that isn’t Mario, who’d have thought it possible. Three stars.

16:13 – Suika Game Multi-Player Mode Expansion Pack. I’ve been a bit outspoken that I don’t really like this version of the concept, prefering Cosmic Collapse on itch.io. Paid DLC that lets you play against others does nothing to improve the concept for me. One star.

16:57 – Pepper Grinder. It looks a bit interesting, but it feels a bit like a cheat that the tunnels you dig close up behind you. Two stars.

17:26 – Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! Originally a F2P mobile game by Game Freak as one of their occasional non-Pokemon titles, like Drill Dozer and Part-Time UFO, which always seem to be terrific. They released a 3DS port that was one of those games that critics (including myself) couldn’t stop gushing over. I’m so hyped for this that I’ve already bought it, as of this writing it’s on my Switch back at home waiting for me to get back and play it. Five stars.

18:16 – Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley. A Moomintroll game! One where you play as his enigmatic, vaguely Link-like friend Snufkin! I’m in! Sadly its trailer is really brief. Four stars.

19:26 – Rare Games Added to Nintendo Switch Online. Five games are added: RC Pro-Am (NES), a classic; Snake Rattle & Roll (NES), challenging and a bit underrated; Killer Instinct (N64), which I never cared for but some people will like; Battletoads in Battlemaniacs (SNES), likewise; and Blast Corps (N64), which is very underrated, a launch game that helped define its system. All of these games except Battletoads in Battlemaniacs were previously collected in Rare Replay for Xbox One, but there is a feeling of coming home here. Overall: Four stars.

These releases are notable all because of Hiroshi Yamauchi’s decision not to buy Rare from the Stamper brothers at the dawning of the Gamecube era, which lost Nintendo Rare’s then-formidable reputation and coding prowess. Nintendo sold its 49% stake to Rare, and Microsoft bought controlling interest. The Gamecube took a substantial hit to its library, and Rare has never been the same. Despite a few distinctive hits (Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, Viva Pinata and Sea of Thieves) I think Microsoft has never really used them well. For a time they were basically devoted to making Kinect games! (Checking: in fact, Rare’s Kinect Sports was at that time their best-selling game since Microsoft acquired them! Shame that its being tied to an abandoned peripheral means it has had practically no lasting legacy.) I would suppose the return of these titles to a Nintendo system is part of the deal that enabled Goldeneye 007 to come to both Xbox and Switch, but that is only speculation.

RC Pro-Am and Snake Rattle & Roll, are extra notable for their copyright notice by Rare Coin-It, a Miami-based subsidiary of Rare, that seemed to be devoted to games that had arcade pretensions. I don’t know that, but a lot of their games released with that copyright have strange arcade affectations: attract modes, high score lists, and arcade structure. In particular: Slalom (which did get an arcade release, as Vs. Slalom for Nintendo’s Unisystem arcade platform), Wizards & Warriors, RC Pro-Am and Cobra Triangle. But these weren’t the only games that bore the Rare Coin-It copyright. I really don’t know why; maybe they were assign games that Rare thought might have potential as arcade games.

Back to the Switch Online collection, this move gives me hope that the Wizards & Warriors games, especially the first, and its sequel Ironsword, will make it there someday.

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Announcement of World of Goo 2

Here we are, at the cusp of 2024, and 2D BOY, along with offshoot Tomorrow Corporation, have at last announced a sequel to the hit that could be considered to have kicked off the whole indie gaming thing: World of Goo.

World of Goo got started as Kyle Gabler’s Tower of Goo, part of the Experimental Gameplay Project way back in 2005, which you can find out more about in this post-mortem here (PDF). Tower of Goo can still be downloaded here it seems.

Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel formed 2D Boy, who made the sequel World of Goo three years later. World of Goo was what got the ball rolling on indie gamedev, and was an important early hit on the Wii’s digital distribution platform Wiiware and iOS. Versions of World of Goo, now called World of Goo Remastered, can be bought for a variety of platforms today. World of Goo was surprisingly popular, and in its Remastered form looks great even now. It spawned the “Sign Painter” meme that went around for a few years.

One of the many messages from the first game’s unseen breakout character

Kyle Gabler and some other friends then formed Tomorrow Corporation, producing the ungame Little Inferno, and the unique programming games Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans, which I can tell you from experience are all worth playing. But 2D Boy never made another game, until now, or more accurately, until soon.

World of Goo includes a version of Tower of Goo, but also expands upon the theme, and tells a number of very weird stories along the way. If you’re not familiar with the series, using an easy drag-and-place interface, you take goo balls, little black spheres with eyes, and link them together to make physics structures, akin to the ones in the old SodaConstructor web applet, in order to meet various objectives.

All we know so far about the new game is what’s shown in the new trailer, which is where the screenshots in this post come from. It looks really promising, with the physics model now updated to include fluid effects. Game physics have come along very far since the first games were made, it’ll be interesting to see where they take it today, as well as what the Sign Painter has been up to since he was last seen in Little Inferno.

World of Goo 2 – Official Trailer 1 (Youtube, 2 minutes)

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