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Untitled Goose Game offers just enough of a challenge to keep a player engaged until they’ve worked through the goose’s trickster to-do list. Embodying this beaked merchant of mayhem can feel like a satisfying role reversal for any human who has ever encountered an angry goose honking at them in a park. The goose may seem a little mean-spirited at times, but because it’s controlled by the player - and because its human targets are only a few shades past inanimate, rather than developed characters - it functions as a scrappy, lovable hero. One of its more charming undertakings, for instance, involves wreaking havoc in a pub by sneaking into the kitchen, stealing an entire set of cutlery, knocking an empty bucket onto a doorman’s head, and performing a honking and wing-flapping routine for a pair of easily amused diners. The goose’s assigned tasks are directed by some omniscient guiding presence, but that doesn’t really matter they exist simply to add a semblance of structure to what is otherwise an open playground for the goose to cause a good-natured racket.
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These hijinks all take place in a bloodless, colorful, stylized world full of townsfolk to distract and puzzles to solve, all set to dynamic pieces of classical music adapted from works by the influential French composer Claude Debussy. For example: Steal a little boy’s glasses, then take his toy plane while he’s not looking and give it to a shopkeeper who will make the boy buy it back. If the goose can be said to have a mission statement, it is perhaps best characterized as “nyah nyah nyah nyah boo boo” the stated objective of the game is to complete a checklist of impish tasks set forth for the goose perform.

It’s also a bit loud, what with all the honking.Īs the goose, players waddle through gardens, backyards, and streets in an English village, messing with the faceless, voiceless residents they meet along the way. But the goose is never overly violent or aggressive - it’s too unassuming, and even adorable. Players take on the role of a goose that just wants to have some fun at other people’s expense, with seemingly little motivation other than to wreak havoc in the name of its own entertainment.

And that simplicity is key to its success.
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The central conceit of Untitled Goose Game - which costs a mere $15 and is available to download on the Nintendo Switch console as well as on Mac and Windows PC - is extremely simple: Be a goose who is a total trickster. There’s popular shitposting groups on Facebook, where users share simple jokes and crudely edited images, replete with threads that reference Untitled Goose Game video game culture websites are left to curate the best Untitled Goose Game memes out there among the many, many options. There’s fan art of the goose and jokes about what its incessant honking must really mean. On Nintendo’s digital marketplace, Untitled Goose Game even held the top spot on the Switch games sales chart the week after its release, beating out a new entry in Nintendo’s own hugely popular The Legend of Zelda franchise to get there. In its short life so far, Untitled Goose Game has found an audience with everyone from model-turned-entrepreneur and Twitter maven Chrissy Teigen to Blink-182 frontman Mark Hoppus to a variety of international news outlets to PETA, in addition to tens of thousands of players. Its fans have all been won over by the quirky puzzle game’s endearingly evil antihero: a cunning waterfowl that just wants to cause a ruckus for a laugh. That’s the most basic pleasure at the heart of Untitled Goose Game, a video game from Australian developer House House that launched in late September and quickly earned widespread acclaim.

Or rather, the catharsis of becoming a chaotic goose, if only virtually. Sometimes, all it takes to unite people is the shrill honking of a chaotic goose.
