World of Goo is still magnificent 10 years on

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 humour 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 flavour 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.

The jiggly, chirruping construction side is as excellent as I remember. Have you played World of Goo? If you haven’t, the idea is that you have these sentient blobs which like to attach to one another by sending out tendrils to other blobs. You’ll use this to create structures—2D lattices of varying levels of messiness. Loose goo blobs swarm over the structure, their weight and movement contributing to the instability of the whole thing, sometimes sending it tumbling to one side.

The point of these structures is that you use them to bring the loose goo swarm to an exit pipe which will suck them up. But the pipe only activates when the goo structure is close enough, hence you can’t just fire goo balls into the air and hope they get slurped up.

Build up

At a bare minimum, the challenge is to build a structure and reach the pipe with enough loose goo balls to meet the level’s target. Later on in the game it’s about factoring in the different properties of the different types of goo, about navigating obstacles, and even moving larger non-goo objects around.

The levels start off relatively simply. You have one type of goo and plenty of it, meaning it’s easy to meet the level targets. The starter goo is wonderfully uncomplicated. It puts out two tendrils and you can’t detach it once it’s in place. It naturally lends itself, then, to building robust triangular shapes and thus is relatively stable.

These early levels remind me of the weird team-building exercises we had to do as part of a few corporate away days I’ve been on, or as part of school physics projects—build a bridge out of newspaper that’s capable of bearing some kind of heavy weight, or a teammate or whatever. You’d always have someone who spent a whole day explaining the value of the triangle in construction.

“It’s really hard to deform a triangle, you know?” Yes Dave. We know. “Consider the pyramids.” I’ve considered the bloody pyramids, Dave. “It’s because of trigonometry.” Shut up and roll newspaper, Dave. “It’s why you see so many triangles in bridges too.” DAVE THAT IS WHY WE ARE USING TRIANGLES TO