Oh Ye-Of-Little-Faith Special: World of Goo Demo

This is mainly of use to the cynics (and the evangelists, of course). Anyone who's even slightly vulnerable to purple-prose will have already worked out how to buy it and done exactly that. If you haven't - well, what are you waiting for? A demo? Well, wait no more. It's currently spreading across the net, but let's point at Filefront for this 33Mb slice of splendidosity. It's the whole of chapter one, which made me start ranting about it all those months ago. You will too.

Well, almost probably. A couple of tiny thoughts plus some more Goo-in-action-video-footage follows...

Here's the footage...

It's a fun period which World of Goo finds itself in. It's absolutely the honeymoon period - I literally saw my first negative comment from someone who's played it last night, and I had to go to NeoGaf to actually see that. Literally everyone else loves it which I haven't seen since... well, the early days of Portal, but even then I saw downbeat stuff earlier.

Of course, that's also inevitable. No cultural object appeals to everyone. The people more likely to like something are attracted to it initially - they're the core audience, after all. The more they rave about it, people outside the core audience come in. And since some of them will find their experience differ from the initial crowd, they express their reservations. Or slag it, if they're wired that way. It's backlash cycle, and natural and unavoidable.

To be honest, I don't think it'll be a big backlash - partially because, like Portal, it's immensely loveable and partially because as an indie game it's unlikely to sell the multi-millions required to get a real backlash. But still, in the time before a single minor chord in the orchestra of public voices, it's easy to smile. Pure joy and gaming. It's why we formed RPS, y'know?

Join us. Play the bloody demo.