My Brief Affair with Mobile Gaming, Part 1

As I posted recently my gaming laptop is having hard drive issues. This combined with my desktop's longstanding cooling issues forced me to break down and put one in the shop, resulting in a large incoming bill for a replaced liquid cooling system. During this time, I've tried to sate my gaming desires through my smart phone. Having downloaded many an app over the course of the past three weeks, a few really stood out to me and have made an impression on me.

I think the first I'd like to touch on is World of Goo. All this with the caveat that I'm only about halfway through the game.

How to describe World of Goo?

It has character. That much is for certain. 

It was developed by 2D Boy, an Indie game developer if there ever was one. More about them on their own page, here. This indie development shows. Not in a substandard, lack of polish manner. But rather, in the sense that this is not a game that would or even could ever be developed and pushed through a major studio/publisher combo today.

Aesthetic

I think this is probably one of the most striking, if not the single most striking aspect of this game. The world is a dark one. Almost cynical. There is harsh criticism of the industry standards of beauty present. There is heavy industrialization, with great smokestacks and industrial fires. The game says much with its artwork. 

The goo mentioned in the title seems to have some level of sentience in the world. You control the goo to accomplish various tasks given to you. The goo seems to be working towards an unclear purpose, all the while it's being harvested by the industrial machine for various purposes, presumably dark and nefarious. The secrets of the world are what you uncover as the story progress, and I admittedly have progressed little so I won't presume I know any more about the world.

About the dark aesthetic... I can't say I like it. I haven't finished the game, and I'm not sure I will, partially because of the aesthetic. It's almost depressing, and I think intentionally so. But at the same time it has a very real air of mystery about it, which is the one thing that might draw me back into the game. 

I'm torn, because while I don't particularly like the art style from a personal viewpoint, I greatly respect it. It is highly developed, and very clearly made for a purpose. Like Schoenberg's twelve tone works, while I don't enjoy the aesthetic, I do appreciate it intellectually. I simply think I'm not the target audience in this respect. 

Despite my inability to immerse myself in the general aesthetic, I think it bears mentioning before gameplay because frankly it left a bigger impression on me. World of Goo is many things, but it certainly isn't generic. The developers obviously had a very clear vision of the game they wished to create, pursued, and I think executed it with excellence. Goo has more personality than 90% of the games to come out in recent years, and for that I commend it.

Gameplay

Gameplay is enjoyable. It's a combination puzzle/construction game, where you fight physic and obstacles to invariably collect goo in a giant suction pipe so that you can conquer the next puzzle and collect more goo in a giant suction pipe, etc. I appreciate a game that has a more intellectual bent, where the focus isn't on action and explosions, but rather stretching your mind in new and interesting ways. 

The puzzle progression I think is generally well paced, starting out with one basic goo type in early levels, and over the course of the game introducing more goo types, each with its own attributes, then combining them together in puzzles of ever increasing complexity. 

My one complaint is that, after some time, you start having elements of some puzzles that requiring a good deal of careful timing. I'm not a fan of this. It is, to me, right up there with Escort Quests, Countdown Clocks, and Twitch Gameplay, of which this is a form. World of Goo does, however, allow you to skip levels, which I admittedly did when absolutely precise timing was essential because, frankly, I don't find rote memorization of timing sequences enjoyable. This is something I think I'll explore further in another post, particularly in regards to the most recent Tomb Raider game, but I'll spare you here.

The game did make excellent use of a touch screen, often requiring nimble motions to contruct a shape before physics could tear it down, made easier with the second nature of using your fingers for such a task. I think this would have been made significantly more difficult with the use of a mouse.

However, on the downside, when you have a swarm of forty or fifty goos of various types writhing around on screen, and you need to select a specific variety, it was often an exercise in frustration. Frequently, I found myself needing, for example, a balloon goo, but repeatedly clicking a standard black goo that once placed cannot be moved. Perhaps my screen is too small or my fingers too fat, but several times I found myself restarting a level do to a goo misplacement because of the selection issue. 

I don't know the solution to this, or even if it needs a solution. Perhaps this can be considered just one more challenge of the game, though I don't think that's the right approach. If I were a carpenter and had to repeatedly start over in building a piece of furniture because I reached for one tool and grabbed another, I think I'd quite carpentry pretty fast. This is, something, I think the developer should consider addressing should a sequel ever arise.

Impressions

Overall the gameplay was enjoyable, but it never quite completely pulled me in. I enjoyed it, but I was never totally immersed in it. I never had the 'Blinders' go up, making me oblivious to the outside world. I haven't been able to lay a finger on it, but this game never surpassed "Good Game" to me. The approach was fairly novel, and the personality was singular if not my cup of tea. It was a good diversion, but not quite as enjoyable to me as the next game I spent time with, Plants vs Zombies.