If you've ever found yourself wondering what Hitman would look like if the protagonist were a large goose, this is the game for you.

This is a stealth puzzle game in which the eponymous bird needs to go through a village in rural England, causing havoc with an unspecified (though very much present) ultimate agenda.

The general goal is to get from A to B in each of the interconnexted areas that compose the neighborhood, causing enough mischief to have a human open the way forward to the next zone, but the goose sees fit to also add further objectives that range from playful to petty to just plain malicious: you might have to steal a woman's vase and bring it to the neighbor's yard, just so he will break it while trying to return it. You might have to move a vase so someone accidentally clips the neighbor's prize-winning rose with trimming their hedges, or trick a young boy inside a phone booth to lock him inside, and this after stealing his toy and bringing it to the toy shelf of the general store so he has to buy it back... just because. Simply put, this goose is a real bastard.

It's all very comical, the stylized cel shaded visuals, fluid animation and piano soundtrack that picks up whenever the goose is waddling at top speed complement the action perfectly and there is a great sense of accomplishment in figuring out and executing each puzzle.

The attention to detail is phenomenal: there is a completely missable aftermath to the havoc you cause; where most games (often including Hitman itself) might be content with the meat of the action, here you will see the woman glueing the vase together, or the neighbor putting the award-winning rose back on the stem with sticky tape. There is also something incredibly amusing in seeing the humans put up makeshift "no geese allowed" signs after you have exasperated them enough. It's excellent.

That said, a little bit more polish would have done the game a world of good; sometimes it is difficult to achieve the intended result, especially when strict timing is of the essence: the duck gets bounced around like crazy when entering a human's personal space, so things like untying someone's shoelaces or stealing a slipper off their foot can be unreasonably fiddly.

Humans are also a bit overeager to retrieve their stolen property, and will go almost to the ends of the earth to do so, meaning you will have to find somewhere to hide it where they cannot go, like under a table or inside some shrubbery, or they will negate your progress as you try to move on to the next thing.

This is especially frustrating in the very first area, which should be an introductory section to learn the mechanics but is anything but, explaining nothing at all and expecting you to figure it out. One of the goals there is to bring a variety of objects to a picnic blanket, but the gardener who owns the stuff will all too often make trips to the spot to retrieve what's his, which forced me to hide the items in the reeds of the nearby river bank so he wouldn't find them.

There are also a number of glitches: in my playthrough the door of the phone booth bugged out, so the boy trapped inside (and the parent freeing him) got stuck in an animation loop which thankfully didn't impede my progress, but made the post-game challenge mode objectives impossible, unless starting the (very short) game from the beginning. In the same map, a person trapped inside a garage kept opening the side door and then closing it for no apparent reason, never coming out again.

There is a lot of fun to be had with Untitled Goose Game, and the time commitment is minimal (2-3 hours at most), it's more focused than something like the scatter head Goat Simulator, and less dispersive and confusing than the overrated Stray so there is no reason not to give this a try, especially if the "play as an animal" genre appeals to you.

There is also a fair bit of replay value, since the aforementioned challenge mode is anything but simple to conquer.

With a bit more polish and bug fixing, this could have been even more enjoyable but it's plenty good enough as it is.

Maybe I was a little too impulsive and hot-headed, but I deleted this in a rage before I had even finished the first level. This is a meme game through and through. You read about the premise and see the footage in some pre-release marketing and you think "Oh how novel, a game where you play as a sadistic goose wrecking human lives! LOL!!!", and then you play it and quickly realise that the premise/joke is all it has to lean on. This shit ain't fun. It has no substance. It's an utter chore to play. And the only closure I'll get from wasting an hour on it is that I didn't spend any money on it.

Played on PS5
Playtime: 15 Minutes
Play Status: Abandoned
Abandonment Date: March 21st 2023
No Spoilers

So, this one will be very quick. Untitled Goose Game came to PS Plus Extra this month and I wanted to give it a try. As you can guess, it did not go well.

This game is basically a puzzle game but there is not much logic to the puzzles. You are given an area and a few tasks. You need to explore the area and find how to do those tasks. I'm sorry, but that's extremely boring.

However, that's not why I abandoned this game. People liked it and I had to at least try to like it. That's when the weirdest thing happened. I got motion sickness. From this game. I don't know if this is common or not but after 15 minutes my stomach just couldn't handle the game.

Untitled Goose Game might be for someone. It has a nice art style, it is a fun and quirky little game. But clearly, it wasn't for me.