World Of Goo

Dealing with a load of balls.

- Philippa Warr

Having long since forgotten the plot of world of goo, but not its glorious, weird jelly Meccano physics, I think I was expecting this reinstall to be a mainly sensory experience. Something like peggle—great music, appealing cartoonish aesthetic—but with a slippery puzzle element instead of pinball, and a streak of black humor involving some goo balls going through a mincer.

I had forgotten the observations about how companies use data and cookies (World of Goo operates in a GDPR-less world), about idiotic, wasteful product launches, about the value of physical beauty and so on. These observations are relatively broad-brush—corporations that put financial gain over consumer welfare, the ugly being trampled by the beautiful—but it’s a tang of playful cynicism I haven’t seen much in games recently.

That’s not to say we’re less cynical now, but there’s a specific flavor of breezy side-eye which feels very much rooted in the late-’00s and is interesting to encounter now. These were the heady days when we were only questioning some, not all, of our metastructures. The result is that its shots still hit their targets (we’ve only really doubled down on what the game calls out), but the mood it adopts is peppy and perky rather than exhausted. Certainly a curio to me right now, at any rate.