World of Goo(d)

I wasn't expecting my preview of IGF-Grand-Finalist nominee World of Goo to go up yet, but it has. Which is lucky, as I no longer have to bite my lip about getting really excited about it here. In it, I start like this...

Having played through the preview code of this, the first twenty percent of the full game, I found myself desperately looking around for someone to tell about the thing. Except it was after 1am and no-one was awake, so I just paced and growled and generally acted as if someone had put a bunch of termites inside my head, and I had no way of getting them out. Thank the Lord of Eurogamer that I get to tell you lot about it, as otherwise it'd be straightjacket time.

And pretty only get increasingly giddy. Go read the rest, then come back and I'll find some more stuff to say.

Well, worth stressing, I wasn't exaggerating about the first paragraph, as some of who also read my Workblog may have already suspected. I've spent my time since passing word of it and how they should get hold of code to my usual selection of fellow game journalists, knowing that they want to see this. You only really rarely get chances where you're slightly ahead of the herd - this was the first hands-on preview of World of Goo - and it's fun to run with that. I certainly urge any journalist out there to see if you can talk 2D Boy into letting you have a nose. I have the suspicion this will be this year's Peggle, in terms of the surface-simple Puzzle game which takes over the PC-mainstream.

Except that's not really true - it's a much more traditional PC game-game than Peggle, whose puzzles are purely abstract things, with the whole thing's plot being obviously deeply tongue-in-cheek - hell, the whole graphical style's appeal is that it's so obviously ironic. Conversely, there's little of that in World of Goo. It's a surreal little, perfectly considered, coherent world, and while it uses irony neatly at a few points, it's proper-irony rather than so-shit-it's-good quasi-irony.

And I'm going off on one, which I'm trying not to do - there's lots of pretentious things to say about it (Hell - for me, everything has a few pretentious things to say about), but they're not what's key. It's just a charming, funny puzzle game. When Jim saw it, amazed by how slick it feels for a two-person show, he noted it passed his girlfriend test in the head - that it's something he can imagine his other half playing and adoring. When Alec saw it, he thought it was quite something, paused in the MSN window for a few seconds and determinedly stated that it was something we should Champion. And John's been playing fellow IGF-finalist Crayon physics Deluxe, so no news on that front yet. I bet he likes it.

We'll hopefully have an interview with 2D Boy just before World of Goo's release, but you want, you can pre-order the game for twenty dollars from their site. That allows you to become a Beta Tester, if you so desire, and gives access to the pre-order specific profanity pack, which swaps the eeks and ooks of your Gooey charges for my usual brusque idiom.

It also has a trailer, but let's link that here to end the post with a bit of pizzazz.