World of Goo 2 Review

It’s been 16 long years since World of Goo slithered into our hearts and challenging drives. The beloved physics-based puzzler was one of the earliest and biggest successes of newfangled indie gaming. But a lot has changed since then.

Polished games from unknown studios with a dozen or so people are no longer attention-grabbing curiosities; they’re absolutely everywhere, all the time. My computer. My Steam Deck. My phone. They’re often discounted and packaged, and sometimes even given away for free. Who needs more World of Goo when the original was lovely and original and was completely dusted off years ago?

I do. Everyone does, really.

Playing this game is a lot like catching up with an aged friend. It looks, feels, and plays just like it did before. Everything from the artistic design of the stage selection to more than a few types of goo, environmental hazards, and puzzle elements harken back to the original gooey puzzler. Even the little time-rewind bugs have returned (thank goodness), making it basic to try out some crazy ideas or finally nail a arduous segment. Within moments, it was as if not only had the game never left, but I had never stopped playing it.

And because of that, conquering the first few challenges wasn’t just basic—it felt instinctive. I was there, watching towers of goo swing dangerously as I grabbed, built, and stretched the increasingly unstable mass toward an exit pipe that sucked everything up and ended the level, just like last time. Like back in the distant past of 2008, I sometimes had to hook balloons onto my goo grid to move it, spinning it around a bit to “walk” it across the landscape or encourage it to roll in a certain direction. Other times, I had to set something on fire or watch out for drafts. There are a lot of obvious repeat ideas here.

Good.

These aged favorites don’t exist in a vacuum free of innovation, but are interspersed with high-speed train rides, low boat trips, tense journeys through the dim, and even a bit of goo-style golf. So whenever an aged concept returns, it feels like a welcome return of a good idea, a greatest-hits compilation of some of the best puzzles ever seen in a video game. Goo 2 doesn’t rehash aged favorites because it ran out of ideas (some of the recent types of goo lead to some amazing and unsettling puzzle solutions—I’ll never forget slowly pushing a giant, gooey mass through painful spikes with expanding balls of goo), it simply wants to show us a good time, while also offering a few amusing signposts and cutscenes peppered with pointed commentary on corporate greenwashing, commercial environmentalism, and the cynicism of sustainable capitalism along the way.

That good time is elevated by a generous amount of flexibility. The goo is as tactile as ever, a fun substance to play with no matter how well you’re doing. It’s always satisfying to simply imagine something and then try to build it, even if the dangling pile of goo I ended up with wasn’t the most productive operate of my time and resources. The arduous challenges for each stage are always there and completely optional. It was up to me to ignore them entirely, return to some later, or refuse to move on until I’d beaten them all in one go.

I didn’t even have to play through most of the levels unless I wanted to, the immense majority of levels were just a few clicks away from skipping without judgment. Maybe the puzzle wasn’t to my taste right now. Maybe the puzzle theme in that particular area didn’t do anything for me. Maybe I just wanted to open everything up right away and then dive into whatever I felt like doing today, happily leaving the rest for later like the treats they are. The ability to choose what and when I played helped to alleviate the frustration and restarts that can come with something as potentially woolly and unpredictable as a physics-based puzzle. Did I find one level a little too heavily tailored for my taste or current lack of patience? In that case, I didn’t have to play it.

Unfortunately, I could never escape the odd background colour choices used in many areas. Many areas used a slight, hazy blur of something non-specific as a background, which looks great in screenshots, but meant that the helpful white lines used to indicate how the floating globs of goo connected were often arduous to make out. In most levels, this was an annoying lack of contrast and meant that it sometimes took longer than necessary to build a solid bridge of goo. In others, it was a challenge-ending issue and something that should have certainly been noticed before I got close to playing.