Goat Simulator
Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:47 am
So, I found Leonard's game. That is, the game he'd play in his off hours while indulging in pointlessly maniacal and malevolent laughter.
Just released on Steam by the Finnish Coffee Stain Studios, Goat Simulator isn't really a game. It's less than a game, really. It's a diversion, something its own developers acknowledge you'd be better off disregarding entirely. It costs ten bucks, and they admit you'd be better off saving 'em for something important. Like, I dunno, books. Or a pricey lunch. Or another discounted game on Steam.
Fuck 'em.
You play as a goat. Your objective is to be the largest troll you could ever be. You're invulnerable and stand one button away from a ridiculous rag-doll mode. The map is fairly small, supposedly representing a little slice of Finnish countryside, but lovingly rendered in great and pointless detail. Your little village has a thing for jetpacks and trampolines, it has an Anti-Gravity Technology Testing Lab, and the most unsafe and unstable gas station ever.
Go wild. You'll trash cars, kill people, upturn private residences and gather human chattel for the Goat God. My headcanon says the place is actually Dunwich, Massachusetts and that you're actually the spawn of Shub-Niggurath or Helen Vaughan. You can try and leave the boundaries of the map with the jetpack, or toss objects and people under the blades of a huge grain thresher. There's no blood, no gore – all because the devs thought that insane ragdoll action would be funnier to watch. You can lick stuff to attach yourself to it, or mess around to try and find the few specific tidbits of directed action. Do the right set of actions in a big wheat field and you'll summon a giant spaceship that sends you into outer space. You have to stick your tongue on a passing astronaut on his EVA jetpack to have the slimmest hope of returning to the main map.
There's not much else to the game, other than the fact that the devs are choosing to play this out as an extreme variation on the way Skyrim's Giants send you flying off into outer space. To be clearer, it was such a funny bug that it actually became a feature. Goat Simulator considers that nearly every bug you'll find is a feature. Coffee Stain will only ever patch out the game-breaking stuff. Broken physics, though? Entirely intentional.
It's brilliant.
I wouldn't reccomend it for ten bucks, but if you've got some pocket change burning a hole in your wallet a few years from now, you might want to pick it up. Since the devs seem to be interested in purging the critical bugs and enriching the hilarious ones (like the way your goat can “climb” ladders by wildly shaking his head and tongue and wiggling its useless feet), there's always going to be a little more to find in this virtual toy.
I bet Leonard imagines he's actually trotting up suggestively to the human female NPCs, giving off a supposedly seductive goat scream – and headbutting the life out of them. Then, he brings them to that elusive ritual circle in the northernmost reaches of the map by way of an unsubtle tongue-drag that would make Mario's Yoshi jealous, and creates a nightmarish tangle of ragdolling human limbs.
The Cythrawl is born out of intentionally shitty physics. IÄ, IÄ! SHUB-NIGGURATH! IÄ!
Just released on Steam by the Finnish Coffee Stain Studios, Goat Simulator isn't really a game. It's less than a game, really. It's a diversion, something its own developers acknowledge you'd be better off disregarding entirely. It costs ten bucks, and they admit you'd be better off saving 'em for something important. Like, I dunno, books. Or a pricey lunch. Or another discounted game on Steam.
Fuck 'em.
You play as a goat. Your objective is to be the largest troll you could ever be. You're invulnerable and stand one button away from a ridiculous rag-doll mode. The map is fairly small, supposedly representing a little slice of Finnish countryside, but lovingly rendered in great and pointless detail. Your little village has a thing for jetpacks and trampolines, it has an Anti-Gravity Technology Testing Lab, and the most unsafe and unstable gas station ever.
Go wild. You'll trash cars, kill people, upturn private residences and gather human chattel for the Goat God. My headcanon says the place is actually Dunwich, Massachusetts and that you're actually the spawn of Shub-Niggurath or Helen Vaughan. You can try and leave the boundaries of the map with the jetpack, or toss objects and people under the blades of a huge grain thresher. There's no blood, no gore – all because the devs thought that insane ragdoll action would be funnier to watch. You can lick stuff to attach yourself to it, or mess around to try and find the few specific tidbits of directed action. Do the right set of actions in a big wheat field and you'll summon a giant spaceship that sends you into outer space. You have to stick your tongue on a passing astronaut on his EVA jetpack to have the slimmest hope of returning to the main map.
There's not much else to the game, other than the fact that the devs are choosing to play this out as an extreme variation on the way Skyrim's Giants send you flying off into outer space. To be clearer, it was such a funny bug that it actually became a feature. Goat Simulator considers that nearly every bug you'll find is a feature. Coffee Stain will only ever patch out the game-breaking stuff. Broken physics, though? Entirely intentional.
It's brilliant.
I wouldn't reccomend it for ten bucks, but if you've got some pocket change burning a hole in your wallet a few years from now, you might want to pick it up. Since the devs seem to be interested in purging the critical bugs and enriching the hilarious ones (like the way your goat can “climb” ladders by wildly shaking his head and tongue and wiggling its useless feet), there's always going to be a little more to find in this virtual toy.
I bet Leonard imagines he's actually trotting up suggestively to the human female NPCs, giving off a supposedly seductive goat scream – and headbutting the life out of them. Then, he brings them to that elusive ritual circle in the northernmost reaches of the map by way of an unsubtle tongue-drag that would make Mario's Yoshi jealous, and creates a nightmarish tangle of ragdolling human limbs.
The Cythrawl is born out of intentionally shitty physics. IÄ, IÄ! SHUB-NIGGURATH! IÄ!