The essence of all great drama is conflict. Ask any author or screenwriter, and they’ll reaffirm there’s no convincing story without some semblance of discord. And while the informed among us avoid inferring false equivalence – the struggles of Marcel (‘the Shell with Shoes On’) may blanch next to the existential threat facing Pinkie Brown or Donnie Darko – everything is relative; introspective collapse for one weighs as heavy as megadeath for another. And that’s something to which the occupants of an unnamed English village will staunchly attest.
I’d love to tell you I remember first seeing Untitled Goose Game but it simply isn’t true. There was no revelatory impact or point in time where I got hit by the ‘wants’. No, House House’s rustic masterpiece first jigsawed its way into my consciousness via the most superficial elements: those wonderful, low-poly visuals, the high-concept immediacy, the all-but-guaranteed concise play time.
Of course, on its own this is merely Indie boilerplate. I could easily have surmised ‘Cute kiddie game’ as I doom-scrolled past. For me, the lede was well-and-truly buried, and it’d need much closer proximity to work its magic – namely, a pad in my hands. And that’s when the bigger pieces fell.
First, the animation – a colourful aesthetic that conjured Scarry, Hargreaves, and other flat illustrations from my childhood, dusty at the half century, but fondly remembered. Then the score – Claude Debussy’s Préludes, arranged and adapted, the piano, pitch perfect for both the pastoral setting and scurrilous humour. This time, flashbacks to teenage music lessons, Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, or the Avengers-esque supergroup of Byrd, Bull and Gibbons and their insufferable Parthenia, where I studied the fundamentals of the keyboard.
Pause for breath.
Let’s suppose all this effort, and we’d just got a vanilla puzzler. Now pretend the Antipodean developers were mere Drongos, magpieing their way from similar titles to a derivative safety score. I’d have praised the ostensibly block art, turning gently in 3D, then highlighted the dynamic music, rising or falling to the scene. But I’d also have quietly filed it under ‘nice but dim’, and been on my merry way to Darkest Dungeon to cleanse my digital palate.
The truth is, Goose has a quality that is distinctly subversive, yet altogether nebulous. At the concrete end, there’s the obvious appeal to our dark sides. Call it what you will – mischief, spitefulness, straight-up evil – there’s an innate pleasure in aggravating people. Ask my little sister. She’ll tell you I was a master at it. Ask my wife. She’ll tell you I still am.
Deeper down, it’s the oh-so-parochial setting, a Fisher Price Metal Gear Solid set in Radio 4’s Ambridge, where there’s zero bloodshed but jolly satisfaction in hitting these NIMBYs where it hurts: their rose gardens. So often, I’ve laughed like Skeletor, as I subjected fools to my Sisyphean antics. Yet, I sometimes pause to simply appreciate the quaint whimsy of this peaceful place. It’s a dichotomy.
Still, the game’s influence has been indelibly stamped: I’ll verbally append ‘…and you are a horrible goose’ to anyone noting ‘a lovely morning’. I’ve got a model of the git under my TV. And I own at least one T-shirt sporting his likeness. Like all great writing, the strapline is an exercise in pointed brevity. Plying juxtaposition and wry wit, it’s no accident ‘I’ am the titular tyrant. A siren call to the antihero in me, Untitled Goose Game is a charming opportunity to wreak rack and ruin with impunity. The fact it’s so compact and bijou simply ensures that, within this tiny world, I am indeed a giant bastard.
This is my life now – and it’s a smug one.
